Closing the gap

Q: What is the benefit of having your stakeholders observe your UX research sessions?

A. These observations help us close the gap between stakeholders and the people we design for. We ALL benefit when we hear from our audience first hand. It allows us to:

• Gain new perspectives

• Develop a greater understanding of the opportunity space

• Identify unmet customer needs

• Understand how our audience thinks about and behaves in regards to our [topic]

• Reminds us that ”we are not our user”

• Humanizes our approach problem definition, design, and solution

• Stay focused on the most impactful changes and make changes that matter

• Reduce the amount of guess work and risk

• Mitigate surprises down the road

• Course correct if need be

• Ensure we are asking the right questions, to the right people, in the right way

• Gain buy in for our research

• Align teams (!!)

• Increase the credibility of the research and confidence in the data

• Increase morale and understanding of how your work impacts users (!!)

• Socialize the learnings in real time

• Connect seemingly disparate dots

• Engage in more meaningful and relevant team discussion