Embracing abundance in UX research

Move fast and communicate things

It used to be that UX research was a field grounded in scarcity. Participants were hard to recruit, research often involved travel or renting costly facilities, and weeks or even months would pass from the inception of a project to when you hastily clicked through a 100-slide presentation full of findings.

But those times are no more! We are living in an age of abundance, with tools like UserInterviews and Respondent to make recruiting easy, UserTesting and Maze for unmoderated studies, Outset and Listen Labs for AI-moderated interviews, Reduct and Descript for easy video editing, and ChatGPT and Claude to augment the synthesis process. Recruiting is no longer hard, research can be done remotely in a day, and compelling video clips and slides can be built later that day.

From scarcity to abundance in UX research

Old beliefs die hard, and any industry can be slow to change. Chalk it up to status quo bias, but the foundation on which the status quo of UX research has been built over the last 20 years is quickly crumbling:

• Participants are no longer scarce: Ten years ago it was common to hire an agency and spend thousands of dollars just to find participants, and the process might take a week or more. Now you can launch a screener via UserInterviews (the tool I’ve used most) and get dozens of high-quality participants in a matter of hours.

• Facilities are no longer scarce: Remote research has gone from being a novel idea that scrappy startups did to the de facto way of conducting research, eliminating any concerns about facility costs and availability and logistical complexity for participants. Pretty much everyone can do a Zoom call, at this point.

• Video editing is no longer scarce: Imagine having to import a giant video file onto your MacBook and then edit it in iMovie, painstakingly piecing together a 30-second clip. It might take several hours or even a whole day just to make one compelling clip, and now you can do that in Reduct (the tool I’ve used most) in 5 minutes.

• Data gathering capacity is no longer scarce: The ubiquity of unmoderated and/or AI-moderated research tools means one researcher (or even non-researchers) can easily gather usability feedback or even rich stories from dozens or even hundreds of users simultaneously.

• Analysis is no longer scarce: ChatGPT can extract key themes from a transcript in mere seconds, and Notebook LM can analyze up to 50 transcripts at once and even generate an insightful 10-minute podcast about them.

UX research is no longer constrained by scarcity. The cost structure of UX research today hardly resembles the cost structure of UX research even 10 years ago, which means we’re at the beginning of a dramatic structural change to how UX research gets done.

Abundance means more of the good … and more of the bad

Abundance occurs when the cost of producing falls so low (or even goes to zero) that new use cases suddenly become possible. Ben Thompson has written extensively about this at Stratechery:

• SpaceX dramatically reduced the cost of launching rockets, creating entirely new use cases for launches (e.g. Starlink) that are premised on this new cost structure

• AWS dramatically reduced the cost of starting a startup, enabling a whole new model of venture investing and a dramatic rise in the number of tech startups

• Netflix eliminated the scarcity of prime time slots, allowing content to be viewed anytime, anywhere and ushering in an era of binge-watching.

Perhaps the ultimate manifestation of abundance is the internet itself, which dramatically lowered the cost of publishing and led to an explosion of content. Google, the ultimate aggregator (to use Ben Thompson’s coinage), arose to solve a side effect of this explosion of content — it was becoming increasingly difficult to find the stuff that was truly valuable. Google helped people find the signal they cared about amidst the noise of the internet.

How abundance is changing UX research

The newfound abundance in UX research has several effects:

• More research is happening: Just as SpaceX launches more rockets than ever and Netflix unleashed binge-watching, the abundance of UX research means more research is getting done than ever. Practitioners might not have the job title “UX researcher,” but they’re out there understanding user needs and getting product feedback.

• Interviews are easy and you should do more of them: With the right tools (see above), it’s almost trivial to have high-quality conversations with users almost on-demand. And the more interviews you do, the less-consequential each one is. Worst case you can just talk to two users every day or so just to build empathy and intuition, but you’ll likely find that all of these conversations end up revealing some breakthrough ideas, as well.

• Speed is now a superpower of UX research: As a discipline we’ve always viewed the fact that we don’t write code or arrange pixels as a weakness, but it’s actually incredibly freeing! Without these constraints, and with the tailwinds of research abundance, we can power teams in ways like never before. Whether it’s continually speaking to new users, launching intercept surveys in the morning an getting results by the afternoon, or sharing daily success stories to inspire our teams, speed is now our superpower.

• UX researchers will go from mapmakers to navigators: With all of this abundance, UX researchers can now focus on making sense of it all through an adaptive and dynamic approach. Whereas in the past we might have acted like mapmakers, throwing high-quality but static reports over the wall to our stakeholders, we are now navigators. And navigators don’t stay on shore, they set sail as part of the expedition! They’re actively working with the captain (executives) to chart the course alongside the rest of the crew (product teams), adapting to new knowledge (research insights) as it emerges, uncovering opportunities in real time.

So what is scarce?

In this new era of abundance, the truly scarce resource is the time and attention of people who can extract meaningful insights and make sense of the forthcoming flood of UX research that’s coming our way. Editing and curating the mountain of data that the tools listed above will generate requires someone who understands how to synthesize insights AND understands the relevant business context. To paraphrase the Hamilton version of George Washington: Gathering data is easy, young man. Curating’s harder.

Move fast and communicate things

With speed as our newfound superpower, UX researchers can be the motive force that keeps teams hydrated with fresh insights and the strategic spark that helps teams break through walls.

Team feeling like that feature is never going to ship? There’s nothing stopping you from interviewing some users and put together a quick video clip reminding the team how this new thing will change people’s lives. Big all-hands meeting coming up? Put together a quick highlight reel to share with the company remind your colleagues how much your users love your product. Business struggling to grow in the face of competition? Synthesize everything you’ve learned and maybe throw in some fresh competitive interviews to formulate a strategic response that you share with the leadership of your team and company.

As we enter the era of UX research abundance, one thing is certain: there’s going to be a lot more UX research. We can either let teams drown in data, or we can embrace our role as navigators and help our teams get to where they’re going faster. My money’s on the latter.

NOTE: This post was updated with minor grammatical corrections on 11-Nov-2024.