The three things needed to turn UX research into an accelerant
I remember the good ol’ days. UX research budgets were fat and the research questions were plentiful. At big companies like Airbnb we did awesome UX research, but it was slooooow. Projects took 2-3 weeks from start to finish, and stakeholders consistently told us that UX research was a bottleneck that slows things down. Ouch.
But then something happened. UX research got dedicated SaaS tools, generative AI became a thing, and video calls gained mass acceptance. Suddenly the constraints of the past were no longer holding us back, and the UX research discipline of today hardly resembles the world of the 2010s. Or at least, it doesn’t have to.
UX research is an accelerant.
I left Airbnb in 2021 and have spent the last few years working on 0-1 projects at startups, where speed is the ultimate priority and the only way to contribute is to move fast. Startups have so much ambiguity, and so many potential paths forward, that anything that helps clarify the choices and resolve uncertainty can be massively beneficial. And that’s where UX research comes in—UX research is an accelerant that helps teams rule out bad ideas, gain confidence about good ones, and ultimately make decisions faster.
Three key ingredients
I alluded to UX research tools above, and those are a key part of the story. But I’ve found that the right type of leadership and tight collaboration between research and design are also critical ingredients for turning UX research into an accelerant.
#1 - Tools
Great tools give you the best gift of all—time. By simplifying or even automating certain operational tasks, research can move much, much faster than the days of old. Here are the tasks that I’ve found most necessary for acceleration, along with some commentary (as of January 2025) about my preferred tools:
Scheduling: I love Calendly because you can have it send reminders to participants (key for combating no-shows). But if your company already uses Gmail, you can use Google Appointments for free and it works almost as well.
Recruiting: User Interviews is my go-to source for finding high-quality participants outside of my company’s existing user base. For existing users, I like putting a Sprig intercept survey on a page that lots of users visit and offering $50 for a 30-minute session.
Unmoderated studies: UserTesting is a classic go-to, but the signal-to-noise ratio for high-quality participants is low. I’ve recently started using Outset.ai for unmoderated (well, AI-moderated) studies, and aside from the fact that it can ask participants follow-up questions, it also integrates nicely with User Interviews and gives you access to their high-quality participants.
Intercept surveys: If your site/app has enough traffic, intercept surveys can be a great way to get a quick signal about something (with all the usual caveats) in mere hours. I love Sprig for intercept surveys.
LLMs: If you have transcripts or open-ended survey data, LLMs are perfect for quickly sifting through this data and finding themes or even retrieving relevant quotes, all of which can help you tease out insights quicker. My go-to LLM is Chat GPT but I’ve been using Gemini (especially Notebook LM) and Claude more often.
Video: One of the most powerful tools for influence that researchers have is video, and tools like Reduct (the one I’ve used) and Descript make it possible to create such clips in a handful of minutes.
Ad tests: I didn’t start using ad tests to assess value propositions until I started working on 0-1 teams, and now it feels like a critical tool for getting a super quick signal on your audience’s revealed preferences. I’ve worked a lot with Meta ads, and while the setup is a little clunky the audience insights are great for helping you understand who is resonating with which value props.
#2 - Leadership
At any organization, leadership has the ability to accelerate change or entrench the status quo. When it comes to UX research, I’ve found that the best insights require some amount of digestion before anything changes, so having leadership that reduces the friction of digestion (research as an antacid?) is critical for making UX research an accelerant. And this manifests in a few ways:
Senior leaders need to embrace change: Good research changes things, and senior leadership that’s hostile to change almost completely neutralizes UX research. But when senior leadership embraces change, research becomes a force multiplier.
UX researchers need to “manage up” to senior leaders: Insights that affirm the status quo aren’t helpful for senior leaders that embrace change. These leaders need insights that they’ll think about as they fall asleep because they address the very things that kept them up last night!
UX researchers need to “manage out” to product teams: Influence is easier when researchers are deeply engaged with product teams. Stakeholders should join interviews and there should be an ongoing dialogue about how research will deliver timely results that drive key decisions.
#3 - Research-design collaboration
Your design partners should be involved in your research the same way you should be involved in their designs: a lot. The tighter the collaboration, the lesser the distance between insight and action. Here’s what this looks like in practice:
Researchers working in Figma: Design happens in Figma. So if you wish to influence design, you should work in Figma. It’s pretty easy to learn the basics (just watch some YouTube videos or ask ChatGPT what to do), which will get you pretty far. Taking direct action in Figma is sort of like speaking directly in French to a French speaker rather than working through a translator. You eliminate translation errors and, because you’re speaking the designer’s native language, allow them to be a more active participant in the conversation.
Mid-session prototype iterations: A great researcher-designer collaboration means that a researcher can uncover an issue with a prototype early in the session, the designer can spend ten minutes making an update, and then the researcher can show the updated prototype to a user by the end of the session. No need for reports or convincing - just a quick change in less time than it takes to finish the interview!
Research democratization: For straightforward usability questions or feedback about narrowly-tailored design questions, the fastest way for research to impact design is to cut out the middleman and for designers to just do the research themselves. The same can be true for PMs or UX writers looking to understand how users will perceive copy on a landing page or whether certain labels are intuitive. Researchers should set lightweight guidelines for when and how this should work, but often there’s no need for researchers to be involved in the research itself.
Speed is a choice
The speed with which we conduct research—and the speed that said research influences business decisions, is now a choice. The faster we as UX researchers move, the faster our partners in product or in senior leadership can make decisions. With powerful tools, change-embracing leadership, and thick collaboration with design, UX research is an accelerant that drives clarity and momentum.
Note: This post was edited on 27-Jan-2025 and 28-Jan-2025 to make minor grammatical corrections.