User advocacy in UX design: benefits and strategies

Think your users are satisfied with your products? Perhaps they are now, but that could quickly change. Customer demands continually increase, and the only way to stay ahead is to advocate for their needs relentlessly. 

Take the outstanding success of Amazon, for example. Behind it lies a deep understanding of user-centricity. 

As the founder and executive chairman, Jeff Bezos, wrote in his 2016 Letter to Shareholders, “[C]ustomers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.” 

But how can you actively step into the user’s shoes and find solutions that maximize benefits and exceed expectations? One often overlooked principle is user advocacy. User advocacy helps you not only consider user needs but also promote them as the central aspect of your work. 

All good designers know that an essential aspect of the design process is considering those who will use their products and services. By prioritizing user needs over personal preferences, they can ensure the products they create address real problems and fulfill market demands.

The process is known as user experience (UX) design. It’s a structured process that guides product teams through research, ideation, prototyping, and testing. Each step focuses on the end-user—developing products and services that solve customer problems and provide a seamless, meaningful experience.

User advocacy takes this process a step further. It encourages designers and product people to actively champion the user’s perspective, ensuring their voices are represented throughout the entire design journey. By leveraging research insights, teams can better understand their end users and advocate for them throughout the design process. 

This strategy empowers your entire team to concentrate on developing truly user-centered products, eliminating assumptions or guesswork, and increasing the likelihood of success in the marketplace. 

Everyone in the design and research teams (and beyond) can consider themselves a user advocate fighting for the voice of the user. 

User advocacy promotes good UX by driving innovation, encouraging creative collaboration, enhancing inclusivity, and improving the business's bottom line. 

• User-centricity: By going beyond simply considering your customers and actively promoting their point of view, you’re more likely to create products that align with user behaviors, preferences, and needs. Ultimately, this will allow you to make more meaningful, relevant, and helpful products.

• Increased innovation: Advocacy and thinking from diverse perspectives encourage your team to push beyond typical design parameters, sparking fresh ideas and innovations that benefit users.

• Improved quality: User advocacy can also lead to higher-quality products. Users want experiences free from friction, frustration, or delays. Keeping this in mind will help your team reduce errors and address potential areas of annoyance.

• Product success: By creating highly user-centric products, your team becomes better positioned to develop offerings that meet market needs while surprising and delighting users—this might result in conversion rates, longer session durations, and greater retention, reducing the costs of reworks or failed launches and improving competitiveness.

• Greater inclusivity: User advocacy can help ensure your products are inclusive and relevant to a diverse audience by amplifying the voices of those who might otherwise be overlooked.

Teams can advocate for users in many ways, including creating user personas, promoting user-centricity within the company, and taking feature requests. Let’s take a closer look at how this works:

• User personas: To effectively advocate for users, research data is used to develop detailed personas mapping their goal-oriented journey. Doing so helps teams better understand the experiences of real people at various stages of interaction with the product, company, or system. The most effective personas are not generic but represent a range of users, highlighting their goals, needs, and pain points. These personas should be data-driven and regularly updated to provide ongoing insight into user behavior.

• Promoting a user-centric culture: When an organization promotes a user-centric culture, user needs are baked into every design decision. Whether addressing a fix, update, or the need for a new product, end users are considered at every stage, ensuring their needs remain a central focus.

• Incorporating feature requests: When users provide feedback or request features, it’s essential to listen, even if immediate implementation isn’t possible. A user advocate seeks to understand the reasons behind these requests, taking them seriously to gain insights into needs and preferences and helping build a clearer picture of how to improve the product or service.

• Thinking ahead: As Jeff Bezos emphasizes in the above shareholder letter excerpt, it’s essential to look ahead and anticipate future needs. User advocacy means addressing current desires and predicting and planning for what users may need in the future. It involves using research to forecast demand, applying empathy to understand the user’s evolving perspective, and proactively advocating for better solutions.

To effectively integrate user advocacy into your design process, pay attention to these essential areas:

1. Avoiding the generic: get specific. 

Not all users have the same requirements. If your approach to user advocacy is too general, you may achieve only lukewarm results. Being more specific involves segmenting your audience into distinct persona types and examining their individual user journeys. To boost your success, consider users as individuals with diverse needs, preferences, and viewpoints. Try to view your products through different lenses to understand what different users want and need from your organization and then advocate for these specific voices. 

2. Going beyond assumptions.

A common mistake product teams make is drawing unfounded conclusions based on assumptions. For example, early research might suggest that users have a specific product preference. 

You might assume that most users will fit into this category, but is this assumption correct? The answer: it depends. You can’t reliably answer this question (or others like it) without thorough research that provides a deep understanding of your customers. 

By prioritizing user advocacy, you can stop relying on assumptions and get to the hard facts that will help you succeed.

3. Consider diversity and inclusion.

According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 1.3 billion people (one in six people) live with a disability. Overlooking variations in human ability, therefore, is a significant oversight. 

Beyond the ethical imperative of inclusion, diversity in backgrounds, education levels, race, language, knowledge, and cultural contexts influence how people interact with your offering. 

Thoughtful user advocacy considers these factors to make your products relevant and useful for a broader audience, ensuring no one is excluded.

To ensure that user advocacy is an integral part of the design process, here are some helpful ways to make it essential to the workflow. 

• Encourage all team members to view themselves as user advocates: For products to truly resonate with users, user-centric thinking must be embedded into your organizational culture. The role should not fall on one person; prioritizing user needs and perspectives must be a company-wide ethos. For example, even people in non-design roles, like help desk agents, might be able to make a significant impact. Picture how they are constantly talking with users and helping them with issues—that rep might spot common problems or hear about features users wish they had. If they share these insights with the design team, they’re helping shape a product that really hits the mark.

• Conduct comprehensive user research: Whether gathering insights from focus groups, running usability testing with a prototype, analyzing demographic data, collecting customer feedback, or reviewing call center transcripts, thorough research is key to understanding user behavior, preferences, and needs. For instance, consider a product team that reviews user feedback and tracks how users interact with different features over several years. They might uncover subtle patterns, like a decline in engagement with a particular feature after a recent update, which might not be immediately apparent. Addressing nuanced insights will lead to more informed design decisions and a more refined product. Again, knowing your customers from every angle is crucial for advocating effectively on their behalf.

• Integrate user feedback into testing: From the prototype stage to the beta release and final optimization, users should have a voice at every step. For example, imagine a team working on a new mobile app. In the prototype phase, they might sit down with users to see how they interact with the early designs and realize that navigation is confusing for some. As they move to the beta phase, they gather feedback on any performance hiccups or usability issues as users try out more features. Even after the app is officially released, they keep the feedback flowing through in-app surveys and support chats, which might reveal new problems, like device compatibility issues. By making user feedback part of every stage—from those first prototypes to post-launch—you help fine-tune the product to better align with user needs.

Everyone in the design and research teams (and beyond) can consider themselves a user advocate and fight for the voice of end users by:

• Conducting and participating in user research: A user advocate gathers insights by conducting or helping in interviews, surveys, and usability tests to gain a well-rounded perspective on behaviors, needs, and pain points. This work also involves analyzing the findings to identify key trends and patterns to guide design and development decisions.

• Gathering and interpreting feedback: A user advocate collects and analyzes user feedback from varied sources, such as support tickets, social media sentiments, and direct user interactions. Then, they collate this feedback to make data-driven recommendations for product improvements. 

• Championing user-centric design: User advocates promote the importance of user-centered design principles within the organization. This includes ensuring that design decisions are evidence-based and the resulting products are ultimately user-friendly and intuitive.

• Facilitating cross-functional collaboration: User advocates work closely with designers, developers, product managers, and other stakeholders to ensure that user needs are integrated into all stages of the product lifecycle. They advocate for user perspectives in meetings and decision-making processes.

• Creating user personas and journey maps: User advocates develop detailed user personas that represent key segments of the target audience. They also create user journey maps and empathy maps to visualize the user experience and spot opportunities for improvement.

• Monitoring and measuring UX: User advocates track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as usability, satisfaction, and product engagement metrics. Then, these metrics will be used to assess the impact of design changes and identify areas for improvement.

Questions user advocates should ask 

Taking time to reflect on these questions may help surface crucial insights and guide your efforts toward creating user-centric solutions:

• Who are our users? 

• What do our users need?

• What feedback are we receiving from users?

• What difficulties or barriers do users face when using our products? 

• What difficulties or barriers do users face when using our competitors’ products?

• How do our decisions impact users?

• Are we developing the best possible solutions?

• Where could we do better for the end user? 

• Are we investing in end-user advocacy? 

• How can we promote user-centricity across teams? 

While UX design ensures products meet user needs, user advocacy emphasizes cultivating a research-driven mindset across the whole organization. User advocacy means actively representing the user's perspective, ensuring that their needs, behaviors, and goals shape every decision and drive meaningful, data-informed solutions. 

As a user advocate, you’re considering not just what your users need now but truly innovating by predicting what they might enjoy in the future. 

Ultimately, user advocacy aims to impress your users, stay ahead in a competitive market, and offer the best solutions. 

A UX design advocate is someone who actively champions user-centered design principles and practices within an organization. They ensure that the user's needs, behaviors, and experiences are consistently prioritized throughout the product development lifecycle. UX design advocates often focus on building a culture of empathy, promoting research-backed decision-making, and educating cross-functional teams (designers, developers, marketers, etc.) on the importance of the user experience. They bridge gaps between design, development, and business teams, ensuring that everyone understands the importance of creating products that are not only functional but meaningful and inclusive for all users. 

Leaders should offer training and resources on user-centered design and research methodologies to foster user advocacy. This approach reinforces the importance of advocating for user needs at every level of the organization. Additionally, encouraging a culture of empathy and understanding helps ensure all team members are aligned to advocate for the end user in their work.

It’s essential to recognize that user advocacy is distinct from customer advocacy.  

User advocacy is an internal process of standing up for your end users to ensure their point of view gets integrated into the product’s design. 

Customer advocacy is when customers actively promote or share your brand with others. This typically involves loyal fans who are willing to support your business by writing reviews, sharing posts on social media, and recommending your offering to friends and family. 

B2B customer advocacy refers to businesses encouraging their customers—other businesses—to promote or endorse their products or services. It involves creating long-term, mutually beneficial relationships where satisfied business clients become advocates, sharing their positive experiences with other companies or potential clients. 

B2B customer advocacy can manifest in various ways, for example:

• Case studies and testimonials

• Speaking events

• Referrals and recommendations

• Collaborative content