Why Conducting Quality UXR is Critical to Business Success

Published on 31 May 2025 | Author Stevie Vanderwiel, Brand Marketing Manager at Dscout

For UX researchers and designers, getting business leaders to understand the value of their work may feel like half the battle. But even research with buy-in can easily become a box to check during the product development process.

Simply conducting research isn’t enough. The quality of those insights is a huge and often overlooked factor for product success.

For example, if you fill a study with 100 participants, use those findings and insights to eventually build and launch a new product, and it turns out that over 50% of those participants weren’t in your target audience (or maybe not even human!)…you’ve just spent a lot of time and money building a product that may be completely irrelevant to your audience.

Plus, now you have to allocate even more time and resources to course correcting and building the right thing.

In short, it pays to do research right the first time.

But what are the financial impacts of cutting corners? What makes research “quality”? And what is preventing companies from conducting quality research every time? At Dscout, we wanted to find out.

The financial impact of low-quality UX research

Our team at Dscout recently ran a study to uncover the financial repercussions of poor or misleading insights. We surveyed ~140 folks across research, design, and product and compiled data from Forrester, PWC, IBM, and more in our full report, The Business Case for Investing in Quality UX Research.

The report digs into four key areas where research quality directly affects the business. To quickly highlight them…

1. Reducing risk

73% of participants in our survey said that low-quality UX research leads to incorrect or misinformed product decisions. Using low-quality insights can lead to low-quality or misaligned products, and the repercussions of launching a product that doesn’t work for your end users directly impact support teams, conversion rates, churn, and more. High-quality UXR can help ensure you’re building products that customers will actually enjoy using.

2. Reducing development costs

87% of participants in our survey said low-quality UX research wastes time and resources on ineffective solutions. Allocating the time and resources to conducting quality UX research may seem costly up front, but failing to do so can cost exponentially more across design, development, marketing, and, of course, research rework.