Top 5 User Research & Insights Trends

The top trends and highlights for 2022 are presented by SAP Research Labs

Companies that engage people in constant discussion across their product experiences outperform their competitors by a wide margin. This is due to the fact that knowing and acting on our end users’ needs, expectations, and behavior allows us to develop more engaging product experiences.

Mature research processes acknowledge that incorporating user insights into products necessitates extending empathy to the product teams with whom we collaborate and understanding the product challenges that they, as designers, product managers, and developers, are attempting to address.

Here are five user research trends and highlights that drive our global SAP User Research practice and provide actionable insights that educate and allow measurable product experiences that everyone enjoys.

Trend #1: Remote user research has become the new standard.

The future of work is hybrid, and remote user research is a developing trend that is here to stay. User research is shifting away from in-person approaches to represent today’s mobile work lifestyles as applications and tools evolve to match these hybrid and remote work realities.

With the growing use of tools like UserZoom and virtual whiteboarding tools like FigJam and MURAL to engage our users’ and customers’ voices in shaping product experiences, the global SAP Research practice has welcomed this transition. In only one year, our research laboratories conducted nearly 200 remote studies with over 5,000 participants on UserZoom, an increase of roughly 80%.

Trend #2: Accessibility, diversity, and inclusion are gaining traction.

According to the World Health Organization, 1 billion individuals (or more than 15% of the global population) are disabled. Our research teams have been working toward a future in which inclusive research is an integral element of our work.

We are constantly learning about what the SAP user experience is like for a varied spectrum of people in order to create experiences that everyone enjoys working with. Our research investigations purposefully include people with a wide range of skills, from many cultures and backgrounds, and from all around the world.

Trend #3: The demand for product experience measurement and evidence-based approach is increasing.

We anticipate that corporate leaders will double down on using hard facts and quantitative data to reduce risk and maximize potential. Executives will demand product design teams to develop user experience strategies based on metrics, user feedback, and best practices as organizations continue to invest more in design and deal with market uncertainties.

KPIs for User Experience (UX) enable better product decisions that increase user and customer happiness and value. At SAP, our Insights teams measure leading and lagging experience indicators to give experience data to design and development teams to determine product experience objectives and quality.

User experience metrics such as task completion rates, mistake rates, and completion times are obvious irrefutable benchmarks for aligning product teams on the quality of the user-centered product experience. These are fundamental non-controversial leading product experience (PX) metrics that predict user engagement, usage, adoption, and renewal rates in order to offer superior business outcomes.

User Experience (UMUX), Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and System Usability Scale (SUS) usability scores give lagged trend data for data analysts to draw insights on perceived usability and user satisfaction.

User research and data analytics use both leading and lagging indicators to discover patterns, enable root cause investigation, and drive product development. This approach sets an uniform UX baseline throughout the SAP product range across time, allowing all teams to regularly measure and convey the quality of the user experience and customer value.

Trend #4: Exponential growth in experience data is increasing demand for and investment in data science and machine learning at cloud scale.

Companies will continue to invest in analytics knowledge and technologies to make sense of large datasets as they continue to monitor user experience KPIs with in-product data and feedback. Product teams across the enterprise are using big data analytics and live user insights to drive actions that provide actual business value, thanks to a major growth in cloud-based application performance monitoring (APM).

As data grows at an exponential rate, the distinction between qualitative and quantitative data becomes increasingly blurred. Deeper analysis of behavioral, system, and business data, in conjunction with qualitative data, is allowing data scientists to find patterns that highlight tremendous potential for user engagement, productivity, usability, and product value.

Trend #5: User research is the new learning culture that everyone is adopting.

Today, conducting user research and gaining user insights is everyone’s job! To influence product experience and drive decisions, great product businesses are extending the practice of research and insight analytics across all disciplines.

The SAP Closed Loop Framework, Design Thinking, and Research Enablement programs deliver continuous training, user research method cards, playbooks, toolkits, and onboarding for the latest experience management tools, analytics platforms, and collaboration applications to scale and empower our colleagues and partners. Our global User Research Advocate initiative is scaling research through co-consulting engagements in order to cultivate research champions across SAP’s product teams.