Should UX Designers Be Doing Research or Should That Be Left Only To UX Researchers?

Rather than just continuing the debate, we have run our own research into the question. On the way, we spoke to 10 UX professionals (5 UX researchers and 5 UX designers) from a variety of industries to gauge the reality on the ground and their views on best practices within research. We also ran desk research to better understand the context of this issue.

Within this, we looked at the makeup of the participants’ teams, including the ratio of designers to researchers, who was actually doing the research, as well as the delegation of tasks, ethical considerations, and the tools in place to support research.

Our conclusion: the answer is ‘yes’, but with a lot of caveats, such as how designers can be best enabled to conduct research, and the limitations of this approach. The strategy and reasoning behind using designers for research are also fundamental.

A clear understanding of what needs to be put in place so you can get the best results with the team you have.

UX professionals’ views and experiences on the challenges to expect for both designers and businesses when non-researchers run research activities.

You are looking to scale user research in your business

You have a long backlog of user research tasks and are looking for a way to speed up the findings

You are not sure why there is a user research specialization in the first place

From the 10 participants, 5 were UX designers, and all 5 said they had received some UXR training as part of their initial training courses.

After learning this, we looked into the top 20 UX design courses available – provided by universities, boot camps, and online courses. Every one of these courses currently offers a user research training framework, including a top-level overview of:

1. Usability Testing
2. Competitive analysis
3. Survey writing
4. Interviews

Due to the massive growth in the UXR industry over the past few years, staying on top of developments in best practices has become a real challenge.
Our research revealed that due to this rapid growth, learning has become decentralized, with user researchers learning more about their discipline on the job through a variety of means. Of the 5 user researchers spoken to, 4 claimed to learn the majority of their skills ‘on the job’. One such learning method was online events, in which experts share their own experiences.

Such a decentralized way of learning means the goalposts are always shifting for anyone looking to understand more about the industry – much as with other new fields in tech. As a result, UX designers find it a real challenge to know whether they are using best practices when conducting user research.

For the same reason, it has become intimidating for many professionals to transfer into UXR. Researchers tend to come from a wide range of backgrounds and do not have straightforward paths into the profession. Of those interviewed, we encountered backgrounds as varied as teaching, clinical psychology, and even theater. This ambiguity is again a challenge for designers looking to get into UXR.

1

Becoming aware of all these background activities in the first place

2

Learning the required skills

3

Choosing which tasks to take on with limited time – since this constitutes an additional role for UX designers (something always has to be sacrificed in the name of prioritization)

As we can see from the list of UXR tasks above, the role of the user researcher demands a great deal of very specific skills.

We already covered some of the implications of the vast list of responsibilities for designers, but there is another significant factor which came up during our interviews:

Is your UX designer actually willing to take on all these tasks?

Participants indicated that some UX designers showed a real interest in improving their user research skills, while others were more focused on UX design and less willing to take on user research.

According to the UX designers interviewed, UX designers have an enormous amount of responsibilities with high time pressure. This included:

• Ideating solutions with designers and non-designers
• Proposing user journey flows for customers with different needs
• Producing low to mid-fidelity sketches, wireframes, and prototypes
• Testing and validating prototypes with users
• Working closely with UI Designers to deliver high-fidelity designs that are ready for delivery
• Supporting Product Managers to define user stories and acceptance criteria for delivery

Many participants said that having such a wide array of tasks themselves meant a lot of prioritization and expectation management for the business. Some said it can be challenging to explain why their usual work is taking double the time to deliver when they have thorny research problems to tackle without clear learning resources to draw from.

This suggests that using UX designers instead of user researchers is inherently a compromise for businesses, as the inevitable time pressure will mean that tasks get dropped in the name of delivery.

The main challenge of having user research done by a non-researcher for a business is the reliability of the findings.

It’s fundamental to identify mission-critical work and reflect on the cost of having it done by a non-specialist. Having a key assumption go unchecked is enormously risky as it can waste valuable resources on faulty thinking. Robert Pressman, the author, writes that,

“For every dollar you spend researching functionality during the design phase, it costs $10 dollars to redesign that functionality during development, and it costs $100 dollars or more after release.”

“If you hire a dedicated user researcher, someone who specializes in how to do user research, they’re going to give you really deep insights into user behaviors, and they’re going to derive really great recommendations for how to drive your project forward. […] If you have a guy and they know a little bit of everything, maybe they’re pretty good, but it’s still a prescription for mediocrity in your product, compared to having a specialist team.[…] That’s how you get an excellent user experience”

– Jakob Nielsen, NNG

There is a scarcity of user researchers and far more UX designers. This leads companies to make the obvious leap to asking whether UX designers can take on both responsibilities.

NNG puts the ratio of UX designers to user researchers at 5 to 1, but we looked into the LinkedIn numbers and the gap appeared to be even wider. In December 2022 the number of professionals identifying themselves as UX Designers versus UX Researchers on LinkedIn was 9 to 1.

This could be an opportunity. Some participants mentioned how some UX designers if given the time would be keen to learn more about user research speciality:

These support systems can vary depending on your business context, but the key building blocks for support systems mentioned by our participants were:

The researchers we talked to who showed high levels of confidence in delegating user research tasks to UX designers mentioned that this was possible because they had a support system in place and that highly strategic work was undertaken by experienced UX researchers.

There are significant challenges for UX designers who have to take on user research responsibilities. Due to a lack of training and exposure, these challenges can pose a risk for a business when conducting mission-critical user research. This risk is compounded by the fact that both user researchers and UX designers have many responsibilities already, so UX designers will often have to cut corners in order to meet deadlines.

We recommend that teams have at least one user researcher to help facilitate the user research process by providing UX designers with tools and feedback. This has many advantages and can go a long way toward creating a culture of user research in a business.