Research for Business Impact
Alfonso de la Nuez is an entrepreneur, advisor, investor, co-founder and formerly CEO of UserZoom, a UX Insights Management company founded in 2007 that helps businesses gather and manage the insights they need to design exceptional digital experiences.
UserZoom was acquired by Thoma Bravo and was merged with UserTesting in 2023 and is positioned to become a billion-dollar user experience, insights, customer experience, digital experience insights leader.
Alfonso is also an author and featured speaker at industry conferences, where he is inspiring the next generation of CX & UX professionals to create innovative products.
“ It's very difficult to link insights and research findings to actual business impact.”
In order to get A Seat at The Table, as I read in one of your X-Interviews, I just believe that the researchers and especially the leaders of the research team who I believe needs to absolutely be having direct conversation, direct connection to C-Level. For instance, spend quality time understanding the connection between business and the insights that you're collecting.
For instance, Netflix. I spoke to the Head of Design of Netflix not long ago, like less than a year ago. He informed me about the decision the company took back in 2022 the strategic decision that had been made at Netflix of having an independent Insights Team.
Have a dedicated user research and analytics team be absolutely independent, and not reporting to Design, Product, or Engineering. If I understood what he said correctly, they were reporting directly to a COO, but I’m not 100% certain, to be honest.
What I do know is that the goal was to task a specific team with the very tough objective of providing answers to questions. If you look at most companies out there, you'll have a research team under product, or under design. But hardly ever having the visibility up to the very top.
And I believe that that's a strategic decision that you need to make as a CEO: this is a company that is going to be curious, constantly asking questions. It's going to have curiosity as part of the culture.
It's very difficult to link insights and research findings to actual business impact. Like in SaaS, it’s retention. NPS from users. Growth, it's very hard.
However, I do believe that you should have the conversation around the business context.
“ Becoming Business savvy.”
Because design is so important to business, especially the leaders in the Design process, I think the entire team in the design process, but certainly all members of the design team should be aware of the business strategy of the company.
What is it that we're trying to do?
Where are we going?
What's the mission and vision?
Like the strategy, right and the plan for the company?
What are the most important metrics or KPIs of the company?
If we are a SaaS business and we are at $5,000,000 growing at 100% and being funded by a reputable Silicon Valley VC, that's a very different business than $100 million business that's growing at 10% in a specific vertical right.
The strategy, the mission, the goals, why we're doing what we're doing, why we're investing more in this than that.
I think those are all things that as an entrepreneur, I've noticed how it's important to be transparent.
As a designer, I would be very curious. Again, like a researcher, I would be very curious and ask businesspeople, OK, why are we doing what we're doing?
“ Bad data is worse than no data.”
We at UserZoom chose purposely not to let people go out and run with this “Ferrari” [UserZoom] in the street to go grocery shopping, because you know what? You're gonna crash.
I’m talking generally speaking, Greg. What we wanted to do was to say let's make sure you write the right research, and you get quality insights at the end of the day.
Whether it's to write the right script, select the right participants, or analyze the data. We came in with a solutions package that included our research expertise, our expert, a workshop up front, a training session, all those things to make sure that they picked the right methodology.
We always felt at UserZoom, that research needed a craft, it needed training and it needed to be done correctly.
Bad data is worse than no data.