I unabashedly love democratizing user research.

I didn’t always think this way. In fact, I used to have the opposite view: no one who isn’t a skilled user researcher should conduct user research. If you talked to me earlier in my career, including the time when I first started writing this blog, I would have told you that a great researcher will result in you getting the best results for the questions that you need to answer.

I still think that a great researcher will give the highest quality research methods and research analysis.

So why do I unabashedly love user research? Let’s first talk about shadow IT.

Shadow IT

Shadow IT is what happens when a centralized IT team isn’t well-situated to meet the needs of the organization that it supports. Shadow IT happens most frequently when:

• IT is under-resourced and unable to respond to user needs
• Following IT processes are too onerous
• IT is too inflexible

When there is more demand for IT than there is supply, people go elsewhere to get their needs met. When processes are too onerous, people go around the system rather than comply with it if they think that the risk or the cost of getting caught is low. When what is provided by IT is too limited or too rigid, people go around the system to get exactly what they need instead of compromising.

There are costs to shadow IT. It often introduces additional costs that could be avoided. It makes it harder to know how much organization need there is for a product or service because the demand is diffused amongst many individuals or teams. It introduces security risks because there might not be sufficient vetting of new products or services.

Shadow research

When a research team tries to clamp down on research activities by others, unless that team is incredibly well-resourced and well-supported, with enough visibility that everyone knows where to go to get great research, shadow research happens. People who want to talk to users/customers will find a way whether the research team wants them to or not.

If user research is under-resourced and unable to respond to research requests, others will go out and do their own research. When our processes are too onerous or too inflexible, shadow research will happen. Every time shadow research happens, my team’s reputation takes a hit. We’re viewed as too slow, too inflexible, or unwilling to collaborate.

Instead of being viewed as a blocker and thus creating shadow research, I want my team to be viewed as an accelerant. We are the research experts. We do not hoard our knowledge and our tools. Instead, we share our tools and our expertise. Instead of creating the environment where shadow research happens, we create an environment where it’s possible for everyone to do at least some of their research.

There are costs of shadow research. A team who doesn’t have expertise in research could choose a research method that doesn’t effectively answer their question. They might choose the right method, but not have the expertise to execute well on it or analyze it well, which reduces the accuracy and applicability of their results. They might not have insight into other research that has happened previously, thus wasting time and money on questions that have already been answered. They might not share their results with others, which increases the chances that another team with the same question will go out and conduct their own research instead of leveraging what we already know.

Democratizing research

Instead of letting our reputation take hits, we should democratize research. If the research is going to happen anyway, we might as well support it and uplevel it. When we give them the support that they need, we now have the opportunity to collaborate with them instead of having their research happen in the shadows. We can help them choose the right method, have access to the right users, ask the right questions, and do the right analysis.

When we democratize research, we have the opportunity to avoid the costs of shadow research. We can connect the dots to other research or other related efforts happening around the company. We can connect them to previous work done on the topic, reducing the risk that they’re repeating work or giving them the opportunity to build upon previous work. We also get the opportunity to leverage their research. We get to know that the research happened at all, and what the results are, so that we can use it and so that we can connect others to it. When we don’t have infinite research resources, democratized research allows our cross-functional partners to meet their own needs while we focus our skilled researchers on other research questions that are higher risk or higher priority.

If there is a lot of democratized research happening, that could indicate that we need to grow our research resources so that others don’t have to spend so much time on it.

Creating products that users love

I love that my colleagues around the company care about hearing directly from our users. I’ve worked in companies where they didn’t, and it showed. We create better products and services when we actively listen to our users. When I reduce the barriers to my cross-functional partners hearing directly from our users, they are more bought in to what we learn. When I support them in conducting high quality research and high quality analysis, the results that they achieve are more likely to be impactful and actionable.

That is why I got into user experience in the first place. I love creating products and services that help people do things better. I love that other people around the company care about the same thing. I love that they realize that the way that we get there is by understanding the people who we’re serving, and that they want to do it too.

So yes, I unabashedly love democratizing user research.