High-Quality vs. Low-Quality Research and Its Impact

High-quality research allows you to thoroughly understand your customers. Your products and services will then precisely meet their needs and behavior, so they will use them gladly and confidently, and, on top of that, they will gladly pay for them.

Well-conducted research will also help you uncover unmet needs in the market, identify new trends and opportunities for innovation. And it minimizes the risk of pouring your money into the wrong places – markets or segments that have no potential, services or products that no one needs, or features that no one will use.

low-quality research can cause quite a bit of trouble in a company. People in the company may misuse it to confirm their assumptions. They will try to influence the assignment and the course of the research or select only those results that match their opinion, deliberately leaving the rest aside.

Sometimes, research results end up only in a drawer. People may listen to them, but never use them further in practice. This may be because the research did not answer their questions or they simply don't know how to translate the research results into specific action steps.

As a result, people in the company may conclude that research is useless – it only consumes money and time, but has no real impact on the development of the company, products, or services. Therefore, they deliberately omit it and continue to make decisions based on intuition.
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In contrast, The task of a high-quality researcher or research agency is to prevent this.

A Good Brief = The Foundation of Success

The key to high-quality research is an excellent brief. We often encounter briefs in companies that include requirements for methodology or the number of respondents, but the research objectives and research questions, on which the entire research design is based, are missing. We sometimes receive an email like this:

“We want you to conduct usability testing for us in the form of interviews with at least 20 people and ask them which visual of our application they like better.”

An experienced researcher will not be satisfied with such an assignment and will ask further questions to find out what you really need from the research. Ultimately, the original request becomes:

“We have 2 different visual concepts for the same application and we can't decide which one to start developing. Management is pushing for option A; in the UX department, we think option B will be better, but we don't have the necessary data. We need to know which concept users will find easier to work with and which one better reflects where we want to take our brand.”

Based on such a brief, the researcher will most likely suggest a different data collection method – for example, (semi) quantitative unmoderated testing with more users. And they will recommend measurable metrics through which you can objectively compare both concepts.

You can recognize a good researcher by the fact that they are often not satisfied with the first brief. At the beginning of the collaboration, it will be key for them to thoroughly understand the context and your goals and to properly set your expectations from the research, so that you know exactly what you will get from them.

Be Involved in the Research

A good researcher or agency will discuss the research plan with you and willingly explain why they want to proceed in a given way. They will not take your comments as criticism, but as valuable feedback.

During the preparation and implementation of the research, they will gladly let you have a look behind the scenes – they will share interim results, invite you to interviews with respondents, or you will discuss the results together. This allows you to check that the research is still heading in the right direction and that its results will be truly useful and easily understandable to you.

Are you interested in the topic of user research maturity in companies? Also read an interview with Ondřej on the topic of UXR maturity.

A Detailed Report Isn't Enough

An equally important, but often overlooked, part of research is the communication of its results to the organization.

‍It is usually not enough to create a comprehensive and detailed report – it is necessary to adapt the results to the specific needs and roles of individual stakeholders in the company. The researcher should ask you:

• Who will work with the results?
  
• What from the research is important for these people?
• What from the research can they use in their further work?
  
• What from the report is superfluous for these people (and they don't need to know)?
• In what form is it appropriate to present the output? How much time do they have for it?
• What language to use to make the output understandable?

A good researcher should not simply rely on the fact that people in the organization will study the report themselves. They may organize a presentation for management, participate in an ideation workshop where designers will come up with a new feature based on research results, or create easily understandable visual materials – for example, posters describing personas.

You probably understand that you can also recognize a good researcher by their presentation skills and ability to simplify complex information without distorting its meaning.

How to Recognize a High-Quality Researcher?

Let’s Summarize:

• A good researcher always asks about the deeper context and your specific needs.
  
• They actively involve you in the process – they share interim results with you and inform you about the progress, so you have an overview of where the research is heading.
• They are able to present complex information simply and clearly without distorting its meaning.
  
• The submission of a detailed report does not end their work. They are interested in how to effectively communicate the results to different people in the company so that they are truly useful.
• And of course, they know how to set research metrics, excellently select respondents, create a questionnaire, or moderate interviews. But we'll talk about that another time.