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December 16, 2025
When teams talk about determining the impact of UX research, most conversations jump right to the ROI, the business metrics, the net promoter scores.
These are all highly powerful ways to measure the impact of UXR. They are clear cut data points that show the positive financial and strategic outcomes that come from investing in research. In fact, CXperts has previously shared our POV on How Brands Get the Highest ROI From UX Research.
However, there is an important piece of UX research outcomes that isn’t discussed as frequently - the culture shift that can occur when a company understands the value of UX research.
This return isn’t about the metrics, but the intangible boost that comes in team confidence, clarity, and collaboration when UX work is highly valued.
UX research is one of the few mechanisms that brings the voice of the customer directly to all of the teams in the room. When UX research is properly shared and dispersed, it builds connections across disciplines - engineers, designers, marketers, and C-level leaders. A single powerful user quote can immediately illustrate a major pain point, leading to key user-centric conversations.
As consultants, we’ve seen the full spectrum of companies with different relationships to UX and customer experience insights. Many clients might start small with a quick survey or a usability study here or there - and this is a great place to begin. But what is particularly exciting to see is the progress of teams who have become seasoned pros in utilizing and acting on UX research.
For teams that know the value in conducting UX research, we see how UX research has become the “easy button” for how to make decisions. The moment research is no longer just seen as a box to check, but a real influence on generating ideas and getting clear direction, research becomes something that teams start to ask for.
We love when teams ask for UX research - it means they see the value of customer insights. A pipeline we often see is UX research feeding into A/B testing: research findings inspire test ideas that are more grounded and tend towards winning variations that come from user-based findings. One of the most rewarding parts of doing UX research is seeing the final output - when a research finding is used in workflows that then have very measurable impacts on ROI and key metrics.
So how does one achieve this very research-centric culture? A UX mindset needs to reach beyond just the UX or product team’s silo. Knowledge needs to be shared and research needs to be accessible.
✦ Invite Everyone to the Insights: Democratizing knowledge starts with the initial sharing of a UX research study. Inviting teams or stakeholders, even if they are more auxiliary to the project, helps UX research reach a broader audience. It is important to show everyone the depth, breadth, and impact that can come out of a UX research report.
✦ Build a Research Repository: Research is most valuable when people can find it, understand it, and use it without delay. While reports may be emailed out, research only drives action when teams can continue to revisit and discuss the information when they need it to inform new designs, validate hypotheses, and accelerate their decision-making.
A research-led culture is one where teams know to turn toward user research for insight. The challenge is determining what type of research to prioritize and how teams get a say in what to research.
✦ Education and Empowerment Over Exclusion: If a budget and dedicated resources for research exist, it’s crucial to empower non-researchers by educating them on the work that can be done and encouraging them to share their needs. UX teams that emphasize collaboration and welcome ideas and requests will see the biggest uptick in interest in their work.
✦ Align Requests with Business Strategy: To ensure research is strategic, requests must align directly with high-level company goals. Determining timelines and overarching goals is key in making sure the research has direction.
✦ A Formal Request Mechanism: Creating organizational rules about when and how teams can request research streamlines the process. Some organizations utilize set budgets for quarterly studies and others adopt a more “launch as needed” pattern.
Recently CXperts helped a client develop a formal Research Request Deck that was shared across their organization. The deck covers what research is for, when to use different types of research, and outlines the required steps to request a research study from their internal UX team. This system showed that the internal UX team was accessible and other teams were empowered to ask and use research as a tool.
Ultimately, a research-centric culture requires impactful user research to happen first. Research findings need to be presented in a way that is easy to understand, has enough context, and pairs findings with actionable recommendations and prioritization.
If this first step is the current challenge, reach out to CXperts to get started on 1. UX Research, and 2. Shifting the Culture.
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