Too many organizations still aren’t doing user research before building new products and features. In the nearly 30 years I’ve been doing research, people still use the same excuses!
Based on my years of experience, plus discussions with many deeply traumatized senior user researchers, I’ve compiled a list of common excuses we get from founders, leaders, and product managers when we suggest that it would be reasonable to do some research.
“We Don’t Have Time!”
I’ve been hearing this since the ‘90s. Mostly, I’ve heard it from people who (somehow) did have the time to build the wrong thing first and then hired an expensive consultant (me) to come in and fix it.
This one has several related excuses like “the engineers are waiting on the designs!” Trust me, with the rare exceptions of teams starting from scratch, those engineers have months’ worth of backlogged technical debt they could be fixing instead of building that bad, unresearched, and unwanted feature.
Rebuttals to Try
- It takes much longer to build the wrong thing, discover that it’s wrong, and then rebuild it (sometimes multiple times) than it does to just get it mostly right the first time because you understand what customers need and want
- Research does not have to take long. Our own website has lots of excellent examples of research methods that can be done quickly and efficiently without sacrificing quality.
- Releasing new features that don’t meet user needs is a waste of time and a great way to annoy your users.
- It’s much more time-consuming to argue ad nauseum in meetings about what to build next than to talk to some users and identify how their highest priorities could also serve business goals.
- If your engineers are bored, they can come along to the research sessions and maybe learn something about the people they’re building products for.
“Research Is Too Expensive!”
Is it, though?
I do understand why some people feel this way. Spinning up a whole research team from scratch or hiring expensive consultants can be pricey.
The answers to this are very similar to the answers to “We Don’t Have Time!” although there are a couple of extras.
Rebuttals to Try
- It’s more expensive to build things again than it is to pay a couple of people to listen to users.
- Meetings where everybody yells at each other about the best features to add aren’t cheap, if you consider the salaries of everybody involved. A few user sessions can answer your questions much more cheaply.
- There are so many good, inexpensive ways to get user feedback. Usability testing, especially done remotely, is a huge bargain in terms of how much you can learn for the money spent. Having a few interviews with existing or potential customers can cost almost nothing, and many would be thrilled to help you improve your product in ways that benefit them.
“People Don’t Know What They Want!”
I swear, if I hear that fake Henry Ford quote about faster horses one more time, I am going to burn everything to the ground.
The problem isn’t that people don’t know what they want. They often know exactly what they want. Users definitely know what they don’t want, and the answer to that is generally “whatever thing it is that you’re building without good research.”
The problem is that each user may want something slightly different, and none of them particularly care what the other people want. They are also rarely experts in building whatever product you’re building.
Users don’t know the constraints or care about your business model. They can tell you exactly what problem they want to solve and what they want to accomplish, but they can’t necessarily tell you the best way to do that using your product. Figuring that part out is literally your job! Luckily, good user research can help you understand all those things.
Another flavor of this excuse is “We already gave them exactly what they asked for and they didn’t use it!” I can’t believe we’re still explaining this, but user research isn’t asking people what features they want and then building those in order.
User research is understanding people’s needs, motivations, and problems and then helping the product team figure out how to build something that satisfies those needs, motivations, and wants. Sure, it’s a little harder than just building what people ask for, but it results in something people actually want.
Rebuttals to Try
- Suggest more focused research that will deliver insights on something they are willing to change. Sometimes people hear the same thing over and over because they keep doing the same type of research on the same small section of a product.
- Instead of asking people for feature ideas, ask users about their problems, general needs, or behaviors. Changing from “tell us what to build” to “tell us how what we’ve built is and isn’t working for you” can help reframe the research and get the team thinking of how to solve problems more holistically.
- You can also point out to people that if Henry Ford’s customers had indeed asked for faster horses, he could have followed that up with the question “Are there other things about horses that you’d change if you could?” and gotten a ton of really good ideas about how to position his new product to take advantage of his customers’ actual needs.
“People Might Think My Baby Is Ugly!”
Now we’re getting into the honest excuses. Hearing that the thing you built sucks is painful. I get it. Do it anyway. In fact, if you talk to people early enough in the process, you’re much less likely to produce something bad in the first place, so you might never have to hear them say terrible things about your darling product.
Sometimes, the thing keeping your organization from learning is the fear of learning something that will hurt somebody’s ego. This is especially true of founder-led companies, where the initial product is the result of somebody’s ✨great idea✨, and they simply refuse to consider that people might disagree with them about how great it is.
Erika Hall, author of Just Enough Research, put it this way:
“We don’t have time to do research” is usually a synonym for “We can’t risk learning something that takes out a load-bearing myth in our organization.” It’s never actually true.
Rebuttals to Try
- Some babies are ugly. Most grow out of it. Products sometimes need a little help to be better, and you’ll never make them better if you can’t tell what’s wrong with them.
- If that doesn’t work, tell them that, of course, their baby is beautiful, and why wouldn’t they want to hear everybody else say so? You might not want to be in the building when the actual study results are in, though.
“We A/B Test Everything!”
Before I start making fun of people who use this excuse, I would like to say that I personally find A/B testing useful in many situations. But it is not a replacement for good qualitative research. It simply doesn’t do the same thing.
For example, you can’t A/B test a thing until you’ve built it, but you can talk to potential users before you have any sort of product at all. You don’t even need an idea for a product. In fact, talking to potential users is a great way to come up with great ideas for products! It is just so much faster.
An A/B test cannot tell you why the results are what they are. It can certainly tell you whether one thing did better on a certain set of metrics than another thing. That’s pretty much it.
Qualitative research provides all the reasons why certain features or interactions perform well or fail, which means you make better decisions in the future rather than just making wild guesses and then seeing if you were right.
Rebuttals to Try
- It will cost a lot less money to get feedback before making a big change rather than building a thing, finding out it’s wrong, and then potentially having to revert it or change it quickly if it fails.
- While A/B testing will tell you which design did better, qualitative research can tell you why it did better.
- Look at the impact of previous A/B tests. Frequently, companies that insist on A/B testing everything will have a long string of tests that had no significant impact because the two tested versions were not based on good research data. Show them that you’re more likely to make a winning change if you know what people want before you build it by running some qualitative research and generating better hypotheses for your A/B tests.
A Few New Excuses
Excuse: "We don't have the budget to change our approach if we find out we are wrong."
My response: I appreciate the honesty here! If you’re not going to change anything, why waste time with research? On the other hand, if you can find out ahead of time that what you’re building is wrong, you can save a lot of time by just giving up entirely.
Excuse: “Doing research means overworking our single overworked UX researcher.”
My response: While I appreciate the concern for the delicate health of my research colleagues, have these organizations considered hiring more researchers? I know budgets are tight, but this is a bad place to cut. For more arguments, see everything I said in the section Research Is Too Expensive.
Excuse: “If we do research, it will cause learned helplessness on the part of the teams.”
My response: I don’t even know how to respond to somebody who would say something like this to another human being. Heaven forbid we make anything slightly easier for the team.
Excuse: "The marketing agency handles all our customers' data, and I don't want to ask them, so I don't step on any toes."
My response: If you can’t step on the marketing agency’s toes, honestly, what are you even paying them for? All joking aside, turf wars between various groups can cause serious problems. Ideally, you want to foster a culture where more people doing various sorts of research is considered a good thing rather than fighting for who gets to control everything.
Excuse: “We have millions of users, so there’s no value in asking for the opinions of just a handful.”
My response: I’d be happy to ask all of them for you, but that level of research might get a little bit too expensive. This is a sad excuse by somebody who doesn’t understand user research. Or sampling. Or statistics. Or people.
The Real Reason People Don't Do Research…
These are all excuses, and not very good ones if you do know anything about user research. It’s very easy to show people why they’re wrong, and sometimes you can even convince them to give good research a try.
Unfortunately, there’s one reason for not doing research that is very common and much harder to overcome. The sad truth is that, in many organizations, the incentives are simply misaligned.
At too many companies, especially larger ones, there is no real benefit to delivering something that really benefits users. Teams are rewarded for building new features, shipping fast, and delivering the latest trends.
By the time something gets rolled out to users and fails to make a positive impact, the people who led the charge have already been promoted or have moved on to build the next big thing that is absolutely going to be a game changer. Trying to convince them to slow down just a bit so that they build something that will be great for users and the business doesn’t work, because they don’t get rewarded for that, nor, in most cases, do they get penalized if the feature fails.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a great recommendation for how to respond to that particular excuse, except maybe to say goodbye.
Reference
Hall, E. 2024. Just Enough Research: 2024 Edition. Mule Books. 202 pp. ISBN 979‑8989358717.
