Are CX/UX Researchers and Designers Delivering Value?
A common social post and article the last couple of years has been about how CX/UX Researchers and Designers are just not delivering value. Some posts say that these practitioners aren’t thinking critically in their work.
It’s typically pointed out that teammates can tell that these people are just not offering much, and it’s hinted that this might be a reason why many in CX/UX have been laid off. These jobs were cut and haven’t yet come back; companies claim that they really didn’t see a reason to have someone in this role, especially if they read a book that said Product Managers can do this work.
The immediate finger-pointing, blame, and gaslighting are directed at the CX/UX practitioner. You, the Designer or Researcher, just weren’t delivering value. You weren’t strategic or thinking critically. Why do we need you?
Your team and company can’t disempower UX practitioners, and then complain that they are weak, bad at their work, not delivering value, or not thinking critically.
Before we blame them — and potentially gaslight them — for something they didn’t cause, let’s ask some tough critical thinking questions.
Recommended Reading: my two-part article series, “Immediate Value of CX/UX Research.”
Critical Thinking Question #1: Is your CX/UX practitioner allowed to deliver value?
At most jobs, this is a pretty clear no.
Does your company or team empower CX/UX practitioners to do the job they were hired to do, and do it well? If not, there is no way they can deliver value, and it won’t be their fault.
Do we claim to have a “trio” or “triad” that includes UX, but then we don’t let UX make any decisions? Do we listen to their voice? Do we seek it out when it’s not in that meeting, or do we make UX decisions without UX specialists present? Does your team insist on letting non-UX roles make UX decisions? Well, do you let UX or Engineers make Product Management decisions? CX and UX must make decisions in their own domain. Blocking that disempowers your CX and UX specialists, and reduces the value they are allowed to create.
Researchers and Designers are too often treated as secretaries and assistants to Product Managers or Product Leaders. CX/UX isn’t treated as autonomous teammates or partners. They are not included in early project planning so that they can determine the right work to do to set the team up for success.
CX/UX rarely gets to plan or roadmap their own work. We sing hymns to “empowered teams” and hang more posters on the wall about employee experience. Meanwhile, projects are planned without CX/UX staff, who learn later that someone else decided that UX will get only hours or days to deliver final insights, answers, knowledge, concepts, designs, or more.
Treated as assistants, CX/UX Researchers are often told (typically by PMs) what research to do, what methods to use, how long to take, and good luck having time or budget to recruit the right people for the study. It’s also rare that a Researcher is allowed to do early discovery or qualitative research that would help us understand target audiences and their tasks, perceptions, and unmet needs.
“Either Researchers have to learn the business or the business should learn and do research.”
Those aren’t our only two choices. And I’m not sure this concept stands up well to critical thinking.
Again: are your Researchers allowed to be involved in the business? Are they included when we create strategies? Make decisions? Plan? Do we wait for Researchers to learn the answers to our questions before we guess or solutionize? Do research insights influence strategies, priorities, and decisions? If not, is that the Researcher’s fault?
I’ve heard stories of Researchers required to submit “editable” versions of their reports so that someone from outside of CX/UX can edit that report, often to say what they were hoping it would say. Does manipulated research deliver value?
Many companies are blocking Researchers from more strategic and business-oriented discussions. We can pick on them for not “learning the business,” but if they are blocked from being involved in the business, is it still their fault?
It’s truly bizarre and surreal to block people from delivering more value and then complain that they’re not delivering more value.
Critical Thinking Question #2: Did we hire critical thinkers? Or did we specifically choose to hire order takers who won’t make waves?
Do we welcome our CX/UX staff questioning our processes, ideas, concepts, designs, and more? Are we grateful that they are helping us find and mitigate risk? I find that’s often a no. When I start asking critical thinking questions, I’m often not invited back to workshops and meetings.
Did we hire critical thinkers? Or did we decide those stronger personalities “weren’t a culture fit”? You can’t reject job candidates with good critical thinking and then complain that the more submissive, order taking, or non-problem-solving personalities you hired aren’t thinking critically.
Or maybe you did hire great critical thinkers, but you’ve made it clear that you don’t want that critical thinking, especially if it throws a wrench into current plans or disproves something we wanted to build.
Most people went into CX or UX to be problem finders and problem solvers. They wanted to really understand users and our opportunities to make something better for them. Our teams keep saying we want to delight users and have empathy. UX is here for customer intelligence, knowledge, evidence, risk identification and mitigation, product and service strategy, and more.
“But we need questions answered!”
CX/UX practitioners, especially Researchers, would love to collect all of your open questions and use the right methods to get answers. They’d love to replace opinions, guesses, and assumptions with evidence, data, and knowledge.
Did you let them? Or did you decide they’re too slow? Or talking to users isn’t the right method… unless PMs, Sales, or Engineers want to talk to users, in which case it’s the right method, but only for them? Did you lock Researchers into short time frames, working alone, or juggling multiple projects, while expecting them to do an expert job?
Critical Thinking Question #3: Do we follow Agile Manifesto principle five?
“Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.” — Agile Manifesto
Do we trust UX practitioners to get the job done? Do we let them do their jobs? Or do we have other people on our team who think it would be cool or fast to try this work, whether or not they’re good at it?
If you hired critical thinkers, great! Well done! Do you welcome what they say or ask? Are we grateful when they warn us about project risk? Or when they suggest a workflow or design that doesn’t match what the Product Manager or a stakeholder envisioned?
Do we allow Designers to work on the one or two best ideas, given the problem we are trying to solve and the outcomes we are trying to create? Or do we act like design can or should be be workshopped? Do we believe that a Designer’s work is a team sport where everybody is a player and possibly everybody is a coach?
Did we announce that everybody on the team is a design thinker and anybody can use Figma and make some designs?
Take a look at your team and see if you are upholding Principle 5.
Critical Thinking Question #4: Who is being held accountable for disempowering UX?
We would know how disempowered our UX practitioners were if there were accountability.
Let’s say that the interaction design and prototyping is left completely to me. This means that if something goes wrong related to the interaction design in usability testing, an A/B test, experiment, or after the product launches, I’m held accountable. Someone will ask me why that went wrong or why I didn’t do a better job.
I want those questions, because perhaps the answer is how disempowered I was and how little time I got to do my job well. How thin I’m spread across multiple projects that expect me to deliver genius work in what feels like hours.
Accountability would also fix many of our process problems. If a Product Manager decides they’re the Researcher and/or the Designer, and then this feature fails in small or large ways, they should be held accountable. Someone might decide that this PM cannot be the Researcher or Designer in the future because it’s too likely to produce failure.
If a PM can be demoted, fired, lose some of their budget, end up on a Performance Improvement Plan, or experience some other consequence because they did UX work poorly, perhaps they would want to leave that work to specialists.
What is the value of a strategic role who helps the team know how to go in the right direction?
That’s CX and UX, but only if we allow them to execute strategically. If we hire for order takers, or if we hire critical thinkers but demand that they take orders, there is only so surprised we should be that these people are not strategic or delivering value. We blocked them.
If someone taking your orders isn’t delivering value, perhaps your orders lack value. If someone following your strategy isn’t delivering value, perhaps your strategy is poor. Look for the root causes, which might not be the practitioner.
UX practitioners are sometimes not delivering value or critical thinking to their teams. This is unfortunately true. But the questions that need to accompany this statement include:
- Were they empowered to think critically and deliver value?
- Were they encouraged to do so?
- Did their performance assessment include their critical thinking? Did we judge a UX practitioner’s technical excellence, attention to detail, ability to guide teams to make better decisions, and to find and solve problems before customers and users suffer with poor products and services?
- Were they judged based on how well they followed orders, tap danced along, didn’t make waves, and met deadlines?
- Did we judge them by how “happy” they made a stakeholder by being that person’s silent and submissive assistant?
- Did we tell them they did the right thing when they ran a fast and flawed survey that might set us up with false data?
Before you lay people off for not delivering value, create some value of your own by checking if these people had any opportunity to create value. Did they have autonomy? Were they empowered?
Is their work seen as a specialized domain that must be done by specialized people, the way we look at nearly every other domain at our company? Or are they treated like anybody can do your easy work? We don’t ask Developers to do Marketing work. We don’t ask Marketers to do Product Management work. And most Product Managers are not writing code. Why do we let anybody or everybody do UX work, and why are we OK with that work being done badly by people without skill, training, or talent?
Take a fresh and honest look at your CX and UX practitioners. Did we empower them to create value? If not, then please don’t crap on them for “not creating enough value.” Give them a chance to create value.
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