Costly UX Research Mistakes to Avoid

Maybe you can relate, your stakeholders think design research is a waste of time. They had experiences where the team had conducted research, validated the ideas but then once the product launched, customers didn’t use it 😳. How did that happen?

Here are 8 costly, and all too common, mistakes preventing you from conducting high impact design research:

1. Unclear research goals/objectives (must-have well-defined questions that should be answered by the end of the study)
2. Project and client teams not observing the research and participating in the synthesis
3. Asking participants leading or loaded questions (ex: Which of our product features did you find most useful? this assumes they found them useful)
4. Seeking validation VS feedback, must create space for participants to be critical
5. Talking more than listening or selling your concept to participants
6. Having no stimuli for participants to react to
7. Not leveraging activities (ex: card sorting) to co-create with participants
8. Selecting a group of participants that do not represent the target population or mixed sentiment (positive, neutral, negative) toward your product, service, technology, company

What would you add? Leave a comment.

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