Scaling user research through democratization

User research is essential to serve your customers better—but if the data and insights you collect aren’t easily accessible, your organization will struggle more than needed.

The solution? Scaling your user research through democratization. 

As the practice of ensuring all in-the-know people have access to your user research, democratizing your user research is the only way every juicy, well-researched, relevant customer insight gets used to its full potential.

In this article, we’re going to deep dive into scaling UX research through democratization, covering everything you need to know about its benefits, challenges, and best practices. Regardless of the size of your organization, this article is for you—because making these changes throughout your enterprise will have a significant impact.

Research democratization is the practice of making user research more accessible across your organization. There are many different ways to achieve this goal, but in simple terms, it involves removing barriers to communication and increasing the visibility of customer data and insights to specialized team members and individuals.

As companies grow and scale, data silos—AKA segregated areas of information or insights that not everyone can easily access—naturally form, both intentionally and non-intentionally. These silos can seem like minor problems at first, but as your organization continues to scale, these barriers impact effective communication between teams and will slow down collaboration efforts.

Historically, only select team members have had access to user insights. But, as more organizations understand the benefits of sharing user research across more teams and specialties, things are changing. Now, high-functioning organizations strive to listen to and act on the voice of the customer across multiple channels, allowing more team members to access critical customer information to make better decisions.

This practice of democratizing user research is becoming increasingly important as teams strive to better serve their customers—because it streamlines decision-making efforts, unifies the core messaging of the brand, and acts as the North Star for all ongoing feature and product development.

Better yet, effective democratization is an essential component of effectively scaling UX research. The more your company can share and connect over your customers’ pain points and preferences, the more likely you are to create a product they love—and we all know that that’s the secret sauce to growing fast and building a loyal customer base!

Democratizing user research offers many benefits for your company, including speeding up research efforts, reducing user research costs, helping your team make more informed decisions, and fostering a customer-centric culture.

As one of the best ways of scaling UX research, democratizing your user research will:

Speed up the research process

Data silos make it difficult to access insights fast. Democratized user research cuts back on time spent digging for log-ins or permissions, removing bottlenecks, improving your user research pipeline, and helping your team move faster with confidence.

Reduce research costs

Centralized data takes less time and effort to conduct. User research is at its best when it is accessible—and better yet, it encourages non-researchers to get involved by accessing valuable insights to inform strategies and make better decisions, while also helping them conduct lightweight research to gather insights faster.

Make more informed decisions

Better access to customer insights equals better decision-making capabilities. With wider access across your team and your entire organization, managers, designers, engineers, and more can make better choices that best align with your customers’ key pain points.

Foster a customer-centric culture

When your user research is democratized across your entire organization, it encourages deeper involvement across all teams. When your sales, marketing, development, and C-suite teams are customer-centric, the best results follow.

Like any other change within your organization, adjusting to accommodate scaling UX research efforts comes with challenges and growing pains. 

To help with the transition, here are a few common challenges to look out for and what you can do to better navigate them:

Research overlap and inconsistencies

As you start to democratize your user research, you will gain better clarity and insight into the quality and sources of your customer research. Most times, this is great—but sometimes, it will bring up issues of overlapping efforts and will showcase inconsistencies in the quality of research sources that you will need to address.

This is very common if you have a large organization and have multiple teams conducting research in their own silos. But, once you get past the crunchy start, you can better tackle these issues, using this information to correct redundancies and better evaluate your research quality, leading to significant wins down the line.

Data privacy and compliance

Maintaining privacy and compliance should be a primary concern when scaling UX research, especially when working with sensitive data.

With this in mind, it’s important to vet all possible vendors—current and potential—if you want to make sure they meet regulations and compliance requirements. In most cases, democratization efforts will actually make this easier, because centralizing your data in a trusted customer intelligence platform brings increased compliance standards, access to compliance-oriented systems, and the ability to create audit reports across every data point.

Increased workplace friction 

Anytime any change occurs, you will inevitably get pushback. Whether it comes from your team leads or from your employees, it’s important to be prepared for friction during the early stages of implementation.

To combat this as best as possible, being intentional about your onboarding process can help. Getting buy-in early, asking for support and feedback, and holding small group training sessions are all great strategies to avoid major pushback as you democratize your research process.

When scaling UX research through democratization, there are some key best practices that can help you get the most out of your efforts:

• Ensure research quality and ethical standards — With more people involved in user research, ensuring the quality and ethics of your research team processes is imperative. As you democratize, set up a review process to ensure that insights are accessed by those who need them, while keeping the right access permissions in place to maintain security and privacy. This will also help with checking for bias and providing accurate data interpretation.

• Focus on training and upskilling — Quality research comes from quality data, and as more people get involved in your research efforts, providing training will be essential for maintaining rigor at scale. Consider setting up training opportunities to teach team members how to better interview customers, interpret insights, and mentor others to improve their existing UX skills.

• Foster a culture of curiosity — Getting team members involved in user research requires buy-in. Encourage your team to listen to the voice of the customer by recognizing and rewarding curiosity, embedding that into your workflows and decision-making systems.

• Leverage enterprise user research tools — For the best possible results, using an enterprise customer research platform that centralizes your data and insights is key. Platforms like Dovetail are great for this, because they centralize your efforts while also offering fast analysis of your data to find actionable trends.

One of the most fun parts about scaling UX research is that it’s an ongoing effort—giving your organization plenty of opportunities to tinker with your process to future-proof it as you grow or evolve.

A big proponent of future-proofing this work will be leaning into AI tools, particularly for automating tedious parts of research that are time-consuming and frustrating.

Things like transcribing customer interviews and tagging data points are great examples—both highly relevant for quality user research, but also time-consuming tasks that, especially as more people are getting involved, can bog down your system.

At Dovetail, we’ve tackled this common issues with the help of AI—both with Channels and our magic features.

Channels uses AI to uncover insights buried in mountains of continuous customer feedback—support tickets, app store reviews, CSAT scores and more—giving you instant access to insights that will change the way your entire organization makes decisions.

In addition, we added AI into the foundation of our platform, to help enterprise teams speed up workflows and scale up their research efforts with specific tools such as:

• Magic summarize — Get accurate, instant, timestamped summaries of video call key points, providing an easy way to share insights across your organization.

• Magic transcribe — Automatically transcribe call or video call audio, now with improved speaker recognition and accuracy to save time and reduce team workload.

• Magic reels — Pull out key moments during customer calls to share as a shortened video to engage your entire organization with the voice of the customer.

• Magic search — Quickly search your repository by topic or theme, ask questions, and get summarized answers in just a few clicks.

• Magic highlight — Read automatic suggestions for the key moments of a call, pulled out for you to review and assess, allowing even entry-level employees to make more customer-centric decisions.

Democratized user research is the best way to get the most out of your efforts—and it’s the only way to guarantee that every member of your team has access to the data and insights they need to make customer-centric decisions.

Are you tired of siloed user research data? Dovetail is here to help. Contact our sales team today to learn more about how our customer insights hub will revolutionize your user research practices. Not ready for a call? Download a free copy of our white paper, How a centralized customer insights hub drives growth, now to learn more, or discover more resources to help your organization understand how to leverage the power of customer intelligence.

Companies that listen to their customers make great products—it’s time to eliminate the barriers to making that your reality.

Research democratization is the practice of making user research more accessible across your organization. There are many different ways to achieve this goal, but in simple terms, it involves removing barriers to communication and increasing the visibility of customer data and insights to specialized team members and individuals.

Democratizing user research offers many benefits for your company, including speeding up research efforts, reducing user research costs, helping your team make more informed decisions, and fostering a customer-centric culture.