Episode #82: Making UX Research Strategically Useful with Debbie Levitt

Debbie Levitt has worked in strategy, customer experience, user experience, research, information architecture, and interaction design since the mid-1990s. She began by helping small businesses create websites and shape their online strategy when the web was still new. Her tendency to enter complicated situations, solve what she can, and move to the next challenge led clients to call her the Mary Poppins of customer experience.

Her consulting approach is deliberately adaptive. Rather than impose one fixed method, Debbie investigates each organization's stage, results, decisions, staffing, and ways of working. She speaks with leaders as well as the developers, product managers, designers, marketers, and analysts doing the work. The goal is to identify what is effective, what is broken, and which dependencies must be removed before a change can succeed.

What you'll learn

• Why guesses and assumptions can make product development slower and more expensive

• How research can connect user understanding to business models, priorities, and roadmaps

• Why training alone rarely changes an organization

• How generative and evaluative research serve different decisions

• What leaders must do to let researchers produce useful evidence

Replace internal opinion contests with evidence

Debbie challenges the belief that guessing is automatically fast or innovative. When a team lacks a strong understanding of customers, decisions can become contests over whose idea sounds best. The consequences appear later as failed outcomes, repeated work, poor customer experiences, and lower team morale. Iteration cannot rescue every weak idea, especially when the original direction was never grounded in a real problem.

Her alternative is not research without regard for business needs. She describes efficiency as a balance among reasonable speed, customer needs, and the business goals behind the work. Research should replace opinions and assumptions with evidence that helps a company choose a direction. That makes it business-minded without treating the customer as an afterthought. It also gives teams a way to discuss risk before it becomes expensive waste.

A startup project illustrates the scope of this approach. The funded company had prior research but could not translate the resulting flood of information into a product direction or product-market fit. Debbie's team conducted interviews and some observational research with about 35 people from the target audience. In six weeks, the team delivered research insights, actionable suggestions, a business model, an ecosystem model, problem statements, high-level solution ideas, and a prioritized feature roadmap. For Debbie, the project demonstrated why problem finding, product strategy, and problem solving should not be isolated from one another.

Create the conditions for change and quality

Organizational improvement begins with sequencing. Debbie uses a change dependencies map to show how one desired change may be blocked by another. A company might purchase training, for example, but fail to give people time to practice the new technique, adjust team staffing, or measure whether the method works. Learning occurred, but the organization did not empower different behavior. A credible change plan must address those blockers rather than assume a workshop will transform the work.

The same principle applies to research quality. Debbie distinguishes generative research, which studies people, contexts, systems, behaviors, and tasks before a solution is chosen, from evaluative research, which examines an idea, prototype, build, or live product. Both can support strategy. Problems arise when researchers are restricted to a quick survey, a few confirming conversations, an A/B test, or a small usability study, then blamed for failing to deliver deep insight. Time, investment, and permission determine what quality is possible.

Make leaders accountable for customer outcomes

Debbie argues that the future of research depends less on inventing a new category of research than on accountability. If leaders are not examined when launches fail, customers leave, or satisfaction declines, teams have little incentive to investigate root causes. Researchers can advocate for sound work, but they cannot independently overcome every deadline, staffing choice, or demand for evidence that merely confirms a preferred idea.

She contrasts that situation with an organization where teams hesitate to make decisions until research provides data. In that environment, stakeholders asked for the reasons behind a recommendation, and a teammate reviewed 31 hour-long videos to assemble the evidence. The example shows what changes when leaders genuinely want to know, rather than simply want research to move faster.

Listen to Episode #82 audio for Debbie Levitt's full discussion of research quality, strategic decisions, organizational change, and accountability.