Beacon of insight: harnessing UX research for stronger business strategy
Joshua Bailey
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February 20, 2025
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Just as a lighthouse guides ships safely to shore, user insights illuminate the way to a business strategy that stays on course, steering you clear of costly missteps and toward decisions that truly resonate with your most important audience—your customers.
Imagine this: your company is about to launch a groundbreaking new product. After months of analysis and planning, the leadership team is confident it’s the right move.
But within weeks, the product underperforms. Customers aren’t engaging as expected, and adoption rates lag. What went wrong?
Often, the missing link is a deep understanding of your customers’ real needs. Traditional strategic planning can overlook the most critical insights—the ones from the people using your product.
This is where UX research becomes essential. By integrating user insights into your strategy, you can uncover new opportunities, reduce risks, and ensure your goals truly align with what your customers need.
In this article, we’ll explore how UX research acts as the guiding light in your strategic journey—helping you navigate the shifting seas of business with confidence and clarity.
First, let's discuss what makes a good strategy. A strategy is the process of designing a way to address a challenge. Therefore, a good strategy must first identify the challenge and then design a way to overcome it.
Richard Rumelt’s book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy outlines one of the best concepts for explaining what goes into a good strategy.
His concept is called the ‘kernel’ of a good strategy, which consists of three essential elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action. Let’s break those down.
This defines the challenge holding you back from achieving your goals. A strong diagnosis simplifies complexity, focusing on critical aspects of the situation.
This is where user research shines, transforming raw user insights into a clear articulation of the barriers and opportunities.
A good diagnosis informed by UX research helps businesses pinpoint not only where the problem lies but also how customers perceive it, often using analogies or frameworks to create a narrative that resonates across the organisation.
The guiding policy outlines the overall approach for addressing the diagnosed challenge. It acts as a strategic compass, directing efforts without micromanaging specific actions.
Here, UX research provides the guardrails by highlighting customer pain points, behaviours, and needs, ensuring that the guiding policy stays customer-centric and actionable.
A guiding policy informed by user insights ensures your strategy remains adaptable, allowing you to pivot and adjust while remaining grounded in real-world user experiences.
Coherent actions are the coordinated steps that bring the guiding policy to life. For these actions to be effective, they must work together harmoniously, ensuring that resources and efforts reinforce each other.
UX research plays a crucial role here by identifying which actions will have the most impact based on actual user feedback.
It helps coordinate efforts across departments, ensuring that marketing, product development, and customer service are aligned around a unified, user-centred strategy, fostering a sense of collaboration and unity.
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Traditional strategic planning relies heavily on market trends, competitor analysis, and financial projections. While these analyses are important, they can miss a crucial component—understanding the end user.
UX research fills this gap by uncovering insights directly from the people engaging with your products and services.
For example, a SaaS company might set a strategic goal to expand into new markets based on market potential alone.
However, UX research could reveal that potential customers in those markets face unique challenges the product doesn't currently address.
By diagnosing these insights from users, the company can refine its strategy, creating a market entry plan that directly addresses the needs of new users, ultimately leading to greater success.
UX research is not just a tactical design function but a strategic asset. It brings the user's voice into the core of strategic decision-making, ensuring that businesses are data-driven and user-informed.
Here lies the essence of a successful business strategy—one that is rooted in real-world insights and continuously evolves based on customer feedback.
So, how can you incorporate UX research into your strategic planning? It involves a shift in mindset—from ‘What do we think will work?’, to ‘What do our users need us to do?’
This process includes several key steps, and using a platform like Askable can streamline and enhance each stage, guaranteeing that your strategy is deeply informed by user insights.
The initial step is to define the strategic questions your business needs to answer. For example, what are the pain points of your current users, and what unmet needs exist in your target market?
Formulating these research questions is crucial for driving a strategic diagnosis.
Use a mix of research methods, such as surveys, interviews, usability testing, and analytics, to collect both qualitative and quantitative insights.
This data is key to simplifying the complexity of your business challenges into a clear diagnosis.
Research platforms, such as Askable, streamline the process through an efficient participant recruitment system, helping you quickly find and enlist high-quality participants who match your target demographic.
The platform’s flexibility accommodates various research methods, from remote usability testing to in-depth interviews, enabling you to gather diverse data quickly and efficiently.
The real value of UX research lies in uncovering patterns and themes within the data. This analysis reveals common user challenges, desires, attitudes, and behaviours, directly informing your strategic goals and ensuring alignment with customer needs.
Askable enhances your analysis process by allowing you to seamlessly review your interviews, add timestamped notes, and mark key highlights. With advanced features like accurate AI-driven transcriptions, dynamic tagging, and intuitive note management, Askable helps you turn user feedback into actionable insights efficiently and precisely.
Involving key stakeholders early in the process is crucial for building understanding and buy-in.
Presenting findings in a way that connects the dots between user insights and business outcomes ensures that UX research informs strategic decisions across the organisation.
Strategy, like design, requires iteration. It’s important to listen for signals that indicate whether the strategy is working and to make adjustments as necessary.
Askable makes ongoing research and testing a seamless part of this iterative process. With the platform, you can gather user feedback with Insight Streams, evaluate your strategy’s performance, and make informed refinements based on real-world insights.
This continuous feedback loop ensures your business stays agile and customer-focused, enabling you to adapt your strategy to evolving conditions while staying grounded in what truly matters—user insights.
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Contact salesDespite its clear benefits, integrating UX research into strategic planning isn’t always easy. Here are common challenges and how to address them.
Some stakeholders view UX research as a design tool rather than a strategic one. Overcome this by demonstrating how user insights de-risk strategic decisions and lead to better business outcomes.
A great example of a strategic pivot through UX research can be found in The AirBnB Story by Leigh Gallagher, which provides a detailed look at AirBnB’s journey, including how the founders used user insights to drive strategic decisions.
Companies often fear that UX research is time-consuming or expensive. However, platforms like Askable make gathering user data more accessible and cost-effective, allowing companies to start small and scale as needed.
In many organisations, UX research and strategic planning are handled by separate teams. Break down these silos by building cross-functional teams that include UX researchers, product managers, and strategists to ensure alignment.
The future of strategic planning is user-centric. UX research is the key to shaping business strategies that are not only grounded in data but also deeply aligned with customer needs.
By making UX research a core component of your strategy, you can unlock new growth opportunities, mitigate risks, and ensure your business remains competitive in an ever-evolving market.
Remember, strategy is not static, nor is it isolated from the design process. Both require continuous iteration, a deep understanding of the user, and the flexibility to adapt.
By integrating UX research into your strategic framework, you ensure your business not only stays afloat but also navigates confidently through uncharted waters—charting a course for success that truly resonates with the people it serves.
