Gaining executive buy-in for user research

For anyone familiar with the benefits of user research, it’s hard to imagine your development cycle without it. Most UX, Product, and Marketing teams rely on human insight at each stage of development to build successful products and brand experiences. 

However, getting budget and executive support for an ongoing, dedicated user research program can often be challenging.

Because user research goes beyond traditional quantitative metrics, it can be challenging to present your case to executives in terms that matter to them. Questions like, “What’s the ROI?” don’t always have neat answers that can be responded to with a simple chart.

Getting your stakeholders to shift their perception of user research from ”nice to have” to an essential part of the product development cycle may feel like a big challenge. Still, with a bit of planning, it can be a lot less stressful—and more successful.

At UserTesting, we’ve addressed many questions, concerns, and myths around user research. In this playbook, we’ve singled out the best strategies you can employ to get the executive support you need. Plus, we’ve included tips for fostering a culture that values continuous user feedback as an integral part of your company’s development cycle.

How to advocate for user research

Before we get to how to gain executive support, it’s important to remember why user research is necessary. 

Remember that user research isn’t just a one-time task to tack onto the end of any given project; it’s a long-term investment to ensure that your company is listening to and addressing customer needs. It’s the right way to launch better, faster, more confidently, and with the least wasted resources. 

Plus, analytics can’t serve as a substitute for real human insight. Analytics alone isn’t actionable; they tell you what’s happening but don’t tell you why. Once you see the human experience behind the data, you can determine precisely where to dedicate your resources.

Two approaches to gaining buy-in

Depending on how your organization currently views user research, you may be doing one of two things:

1. Proactively pitching the idea—playing offense.

2. Fielding objections—playing defense.

Next, we’ll break down our most effective strategies for each approach so you’ll be prepared for whatever comes your way.

Pitching user research: The offensive playbook

If your organization is new to investing in an ongoing user research program, you’re in a great position. You can pitch the full story of the benefits of incorporating human insight into your product development process. 

If you remember the first time you watched a video of a user test, then you know the power of the insights you can get. A first-person view of a user struggling with a feature, misunderstanding a message, or deciding to abandon their shopping cart speaks directly to the bottom line. Now, your job is to share the power of human insight with your leadership team.

Show the ROI of user research

The key to gaining buy-in is sharing an example that will resonate with your executive team. Draw a connection between the type of insights you can get from user research and the organization’s most important KPIs. What metrics matter the most to your department—and the business? 

Tie it to business-wide goals

Instead of focusing on narrow objectives like conversion rates on a specific webpage, think broader. How can your user research insights translate to business-critical company goals like increasing revenue, driving new user signups, or reducing customer churn?

Give clear, relevant examples

Let’s imagine that one of your company’s key goals for the quarter is to drive more signups to your subscription service. Show your executives a few video clips of people in your target market interacting with your pricing and signup pages and sharing why they would (or wouldn’t) be interested in signing up. You can even include clips of users exploring your competitors’ offerings and explaining which one they would choose and why.

Then, explain how insights like these empower the company to optimize the pricing and signup pages, leading to higher numbers of subscribers. 

Focus on the numbers

Whenever possible, include any specific numbers you may have, such as, “After implementing changes based on this feedback, we were able to increase our signups from this page by 29% month-over-month, resulting in a 33% increase in monthly recurring revenue.”

Here are some other examples of metrics to consider:

• Average order value
• New paying customers
• Net new leads
• Product usage metrics
• Customer churn

It’s also helpful to highlight any time savings or efficiency improvements you can attribute to your user research. For example, “It took just a couple of days to get these insights, whereas it would’ve taken 1-2 months of A/B testing to get conclusive data leading to less actionable results.”

Point to research

A Forrester study indicates a 665% ROI for companies that adopted UserTesting’s Human Insight Platform. It also found an ongoing 0.5% YoY increase in conversion rates, an average two-week reduction in development cycles, 50% time savings on creating marketing materials, and many more quantifiable and unquantified benefits.

Speak the right language

When meeting with stakeholders and executives, make a point to use terminology that resonates with them. While your team may live and breathe in a world of user-centered terminology, your executives are focused on maximizing the company’s profit and growth. 

Articulate the connection between user research and the KPIs leadership is most concerned with. For example, if you’re trying to convince your CMO that continuous customer research is a solid investment, talk about outcomes she cares about:

• More sales
• Increased conversion rates
• More efficient marketing spend
• Improved brand loyalty

While benefits like “easier to use” and “improved customer experience” may seem like something everyone should support, it may not be very convincing to executives who need to be efficient with their budget.

Fortunately, there’s a growing trend toward customer-first business practices, as evidenced by companies like Amazon. Preparing a persuasive argument that speaks to improving measurable KPIs and putting the customer first should resonate positively with forward-thinking executives.

Highlight the value of learning

Drawing a straight line from a user test to the bottom line is an ideal scenario, but it’s probably not going to be the norm. Fortunately, the value of user research extends beyond dollars and cents. No matter the result of a study, one thing is certain: your team will learn something with every test.

For example, imagine that you’ve just conducted a test on the usability of your site’s checkout process and found no significant issues. However, in the process, you heard from customers that the process is much faster than a competitor's. While this may not show up in a monthly analytics report, it gives you knowledge of a competitive advantage you wouldn’t have otherwise known.

The value of continuously learning about your customers, your competition, and your market are invaluable and can be an important validation point when pitching a user research strategy for executive signoff.

Pro tip: Introduce user videos a bit at a time. Start by regularly sharing highlight reels that are one minute or less during weekly or monthly meetings. Watching users struggle with a feature repeatedly is a great motivator for allocating resources for user research. It’s a lot
It is harder to ignore videos of users struggling than it is to ignore numbers from your analytics that could be attributed to various causes.

Addressing objections: The defensive playbook

If this isn’t the first time you’ve stated your case for user research, you may feel like you’re on the defensive. We have a few tips to help you dispel myths, overcome objections, and reduce resistance.

One challenge is that for user research practitioners, the benefits of human insight feel obvious, and the evidence seems crystal clear. That can make it hard to respond to objections when the solution seems so evident.

Understanding some preconceived ideas about user research can help dispel myths and misconceptions. This section will help you familiarize yourself with some of the more common objections we’ve encountered and how to respond to them.

Objection: We don't need user research—we have analytics

This is a great opportunity to discuss the value of understanding the ‘why’ behind a user’s actions. Analytics only tells one part of the story. You need quantitative and qualitative insights to understand what’s driving the numbers. Without qualitative research, you can’t be certain what’s causing the trends in the data, and you, therefore, can’t properly address problems or scale opportunities.

A great example of this is the StubHub “Go Button” story. While conducting user research, StubHub discovered that the ‘“See Details” link on their event pages prevented many people from clicking. Study participants shared that they thought the link would take them to the fine print, or the terms and conditions, that no one wants to read. 

Analytics alone would have shown StubHub that users were abandoning the funnel here, but it wouldn’t have explained why, and it certainly

wouldn’t have given the team an idea of what to do about it. Replacing that ambiguous link with a clear “Go” button resulted in millions in increased revenue. Human insight showed them why people weren’t converting and gave them a clear path forward.

Objection: User research is expensive

Despite much evidence, the idea that user research is expensive persists.

Here’s how you can respond to pushback when it comes to budget:

The value of user research far outweighs the cost. In fact, not conducting user research can be exponentially more expensive than investing in a continuous testing program. The cost of rework alone—up to 100x the original cost— is enough to derail a product launch, not to mention negatively impacting team morale. Investing in gathering human insight throughout the development process mitigates the risk of launching an unsuccessful product or feature.

Your development teams need reliable insight to guide each new feature or product. They need to validate features before investing costly development time and be certain users will understand a product before it goes to market. The opportunity costs associated with building the wrong thing easily eclipse the cost of testing.

The cost of user research is much less than it used to be—both from a financial and logistics perspective. Today’s tools and recruiting options mean you can have a study launched with test participants recruited in a matter of hours, depending on the complexity of your study. Remote user research tools enable you to run an extensive series of remote user tests for a fraction of the cost of recruiting test participants to come into a lab for the test. 

Objection: User research is complicated and time-consuming

The reality is that with the tools available today, anyone within the organization can conduct user research with just a bit of training. That frees up UX design and engineering resources to focus on making a better product.

If you’re sensing your executive team thinks research is prohibitively complicated, conduct a demonstration. You can either have them set up the study or choose another team member who’s not directly involved with user research.

On average, here’s how long it takes someone to set up and run a simple, 15-minute study with UserTesting:

• Write out tasks and questions: 20 minutes or less 
• Set up the test on the UserTesting platform: 5-10 minutes
• Wait for test participants to complete the test: Within hours

Review, annotate, and create clips and highlight reels of the videos: Under 90 minutes

Total of your time: A few hours

“I scheduled UserTesting sessions, ensuring that I got participants in all the main branches of the experiments. Within a few hours, I had a dozen 15-minute videos of people using the product. The entire process, including analysis, took about one full day.”

– Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup

Objection: We don't want to undo the work we've done

When you find out that people are resisting testing because they can’t come to grips with the possibility of “wasting” work that’s already been done, it can be helpful to point out that an estimated 50% of engineering time is spent on rework that could have been avoided.

Incorporating user research early and often helps catch potential rework before it happens, such as:

• An incorrect assumption about how users will behave
• A unique value proposition that doesn’t make sense to users
• Confusing navigation that causes users to get stuck or lost
• A design choice that isn’t accessible
• An internally popular feature that users won’t actually use

“For anybody who resists discovering problems after an initial investment of design or engineering time, you might need to remind them of the obvious: Any problems in your product or site will be discovered at some point—either before launch when you test or after launch when sales dip, or customers complain or move to your competitor. Putting your head in the sand doesn’t work. It just delays the inevitable and at a high cost.”

– Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup

Building a customer-centric culture

One of the most surprising benefits of user research is its power to promote a customer-centered culture within an organization. The process of gathering and sharing user feedback has a unifying effect. It ultimately gives teams a shared goal—and a shared sense of pride and success when those goals are achieved.

Involving everyone in the company helps de-silo teams. Regularly sharing user feedback—from user research to customer testimonials to online product reviews—with the entire company keeps the customer experience front and center for everyone.
“There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.”

– Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Conclusion

Getting executive buy-in for a robust user research program takes time and planning, but it’s worth the effort. By presenting your case in terms that resonate with your executive team, you’ll address their concerns and build a strong business case for user feedback.

Once your company starts noticing the impact in increased revenue, time savings, and customer loyalty, your executive team won’t ever want to return to a time without consistent user research.