Why product discovery is the future of UX research
Organisations need help figuring out how to build the right thing more than ever.
In a previous article, I wrote about how this is both the scariest and most exciting time to be a UX researcher.
Multiple forces and trends are colliding at once to change the UX research field faster than ever before. Every day you feel the pressure to do something, everything, anything differently.
Leading a research team feels like captaining a ship in a violent storm. You’re trying to keep it all together, but it’s hard to steer and you can’t see in which direction you’re headed.
So what comes next?
There are a few possible futures for UX research teams, but I think a big part of the answer lies in pivoting towards product discovery.
The case for specialists conducting evaluative research is eroding
For a variety of reasons, it makes less and less sense to have dedicated researchers conduct the basic evaluative research:
- Research democratisation is a blessing and a curse. It allows more research to be done (a good thing) but it demonstrates that evaluative research isn’t something you necessarily need a specialist to do.
- Platforms like UserTesting have enabled research to be democratised, but the cost of these is consuming budget that would otherwise go towards headcount.
- Continuous discovery is a worthy concept but it reinforces the idea that research is an activity rather than a role, and that researchers should focus on more strategic work.
- Budgets are tighter due to macroeconomic uncertainty, so leadership naturally looks at where you really need specialists vs activities that can be performed as part of another role.
- AI is fuel on the fire of all of the above. It can already moderate simple formative research and it can’t be long before it’ll cover usability testing too. AI also allows people to stretch their skills further – the trend towards ‘full stack builders’ is blurring lines between roles.
You could argue that research is better when a professional does it, and I would agree. But the question organisations are asking is: are alternative approaches good enough? And increasingly, the answer is yes.
This doesn’t mean evaluative research is going away completely. But it does mean that the business case for large teams doing a lot of evaluative work is under immense pressure.
Product discovery matters more than ever
AI makes it faster to create prototypes and build production-ready code, but it doesn’t necessarily help you build the right thing.
The build trap was never about how fast you could build. It was about building the wrong things. AI doesn’t fix that fundamental problem - it amplifies it. If your team was building features customers didn’t want before, now they can build twice as many features customers don't want, twice as fast.
Faster build cycles exaggerate the consequences of building the wrong thing. Teams can ship more features with less effort, but not necessarily more value.
The real bottleneck is deciding what’s worth building. Understanding customer problems, identifying opportunities and validating ideas before committing too many resources – this is where the value lies.
And this is exactly what UX researchers are well suited to do.
Researchers are well-placed for product discovery
UX researchers already have many of the skills needed for product discovery:
- Understanding customers and their problems
- Gathering evidence to inform decisions
- Validating whether ideas will resonate with people
- Triangulating insights from multiple sources
What’s new is the context in which these skills are applied and the adjacent activities that researchers should be prepared to do or participate in.
Going beyond formative research
Researchers need to switch their perspective to think more broadly about the business and product/service goals, and how any research they do fits into this. Many experienced researchers already do this, but most have plenty of room for development to understand the wider context in which they operate.
You are not just ‘doing research’, you are helping your organisation solve a specific problem, look for opportunities to grow revenue or cut costs, etc.
Researchers also need to go beyond just doing the research. You can solve a lot more of the ‘building the right thing’ problem if you can also do things like:
- Generating ideas
- Creating low-fidelity concepts
- Building mid- and high-fidelity prototypes
- Using tools like the Business Model Canvas and the Value Proposition Canvas.
Building out your skillset in this way then allows you to do all of the following (rather than just some of them):
- Gather insight about customers to identify opportunities
- Generate ideas for solutions
- Bring ideas to life in a way that feedback can be gathered on them
- Test the desirability of these ideas with customers
- Build the case needed to move forward into testing an idea’s feasibility and viability
How researchers’ skillsets need to evolve
Moving towards product discovery means expanding your skillset beyond traditional research methods:
- Mixed methods: combine qual, quant, analytics, social listening and secondary research to build a more complete picture of what customers are doing and what they need.
- Lightweight concepting: use tools like Miro, FigJam or even PowerPoint to mock up ideas quickly. You don’t need to be a designer to create a low-fidelity concept.
- Mid-fidelity design: bringing concepts to life even further allows you to gather more detailed feedback with relatively low effort.
- AI-assisted prototyping: tools like Bolt, Lovable and Figma Make let you create functional prototypes from a prompt or Figma file. This is especially useful for more interactive concepts that you want to gather feedback on.
- Opportunity framing: learn to articulate customer problems and business opportunities in a way that connects to outcomes, not just insights.
Research as a skill, not a job
I always thought it was curious that despite being a company founded as a UX research agency, Foolproof has never had a job title called ‘researcher’. Instead, the people doing the research (like me) are ‘consultants’.
The founders were always clear that research was a tool and that our job was about finding the ‘win/win’ between what customers want and what the business wants, rather than just representing the customer’s perspective.
There are a lot of people in the industry who see themselves as ‘UX researchers’ and feel that their identity is being eroded by multiple forces at the same time. There will always be room for specialists, but the industry is increasingly valuing generalists and people who mostly do research as their job need to adapt.
Product discovery is the most natural future home for those of us with deep research skills. Organisations need to build the right thing more than ever, and understanding and interacting with customers is the only way to do that with any certainty. If UX researchers expand their horizons and skills a little, they’ll continue to be immensely valuable for years to come.
