The business knows best? Advocating for your users when the business wants to get the job done

Over my career I have worked at multiple companies where there is a lack of user testing and it is perceived that research can be time consuming. Here is a step-by-step guide to how you can advocate for your users. 

Step 1. Understand your users

The first step is to try and get access to users. Depending on where you are working, this can be really easy or difficult. It can be easier if you are working on a consumer product as you can get creative with guerrilla testing to get some insight into your product. If you are working on something like B2B then the sales team are the people to talk to, as  they will have a good idea of how customers are feeling. Building up the relationship with them is important as they will be able to give you access to speaking to customers. 

Once you have started speaking to the user, it’s now time to start inviting people to observe, actively sharing your findings. I would firstly start with the team you’re in and then work your way out to your stakeholders. 

Step 2 . Get some metrics

So you’ve spoken to users and started sharing your findings, but you find that there is still no change in stance from stakeholders and peers.  It’s time to be more data driven, see if you can get some metrics. Gathering metrics for internal products can be challenging so I typically look at task completion. How long does it take to complete a task and how many clicks are they doing? How often do they have to switch to other systems to complete their task? All these questions you can answer by timing users and observing them as they complete tasks. 

Step 3. Ladder up to the business goals 

Once you have some metrics and data you can then do some calculations around how much time a user is spending completing tasks and then converting that into the amount of time wasted which in turn you can ladder up to costs wasted. 

This technique often works well as most stakeholders think in commercially. 

Step 4. Compare and present the data 

The next step is to take your data and metrics and use that to advocate for your design. Try Doing an interview where you get a user to complete the same task with the old vs proposed version. You can use the time taken to complete the task and the amount of clicks as data to help sell your idea. 

When presenting remember to: 

• walk through what your users go through 

• explain why it’s important we care about them

• make a comparison of old vs new 

• link it all to cost savings that could be made if we tackle it. 

Advocating for users is not easy and can be challenging. My advice is to start small, sharing feedback from users to explain why it’s important, and then build up from there.