As Paul Adams noted, there has never been more overlap between designers and salespeople than today. Since many products are subscription-based, sales teams need to maintain relationships with customers over time. This requires a profound understanding of user needs — and meeting these needs well over time to keep retention and increase loyalty.
Making A Strong Case For UX Research
Ironically, as H Locke noted, the stakeholders who can’t give you time or resources to talk to users often are the first to demand evidence to support your design work. Tap into it and explain what you need. Research doesn’t have to be time-consuming or expensive; ask for a small but steady commitment to gather evidence. Explain that you don’t need much to get started: 5 users × 30 minutes once a month might already be enough to make a positive change.
Sometimes, the reason why companies are reluctant to grant access to users is simply the lack of trust. They don’t want to disturb relationships with big clients, which are carefully maintained by the customer success team. They might feel that research is merely a technical detail that clients shouldn’t be bothered with.
Typically, if you work in B2B or enterprise, you won’t have direct access to users. This might be due to strict NDAs or privacy regulations, or perhaps the user group is very difficult to recruit (e.g., lawyers or doctors).
Show that you care about that relationship. Show the value that your work brings. Explain that design without research is merely guesswork and that designing without enough research is inherently flawed.
Once your impact becomes visible, it will be so much easier to gain access to users that seemed almost impossible initially.
Key Takeaways
Ask for reasons for no access to users: there might be none.
Find colleagues who are the closest to your customers.
Make friends with sales, customer success, support, QA.
Convey your questions indirectly via your colleagues.
If you can’t get users to come to you, go where they are.
Ask to observe or shadow customers at their workplace.
Listen in to customer calls and interview call center staff.
Gather insights from search logs, Jira backlog, and support tickets.
Map key themes and user sentiment on TrustPilot, AppStore, etc.
Recruit users via UserTesting, Maze, UserInterviews, etc.
Ask for small but steady commitments: 5 users × 30 mins, 1× month.
Avoid ad-hoc research: set up regular check-ins and timelines.
This article is from SmashingMagazine and the author is Vitaly Friedman.
