The cost of skipping UX research (and how to make sure it doesn’t happen)

“My stakeholders think research is a waste of time. They’d rather ‘just build it’ and see what happens.”

👋 Hey, Miranda here! Hope you’re surviving another week.

Today, I want to share one of the biggest challenges designers face in low UX maturity organizations: convincing stakeholders that research is worth the time and effort.

A designer in our community recently shared this frustration:

“My stakeholders think research is a waste of time. They’d rather ‘just build it’ and see what happens.”

Sound familiar? If you’ve ever tried to push for usability testing or discovery research only to hear, “We don’t have time for that,” you’re not alone.

Let me tell you what I’ve seen work in my many years in this field—and how you can start changing minds too.

The "Too Late" Research Regret

Not that long ago, a designer I was mentoring was working on a product team that was excited about a new feature idea. The stakeholders wanted to move fast—no time for research, just ship it.

Three weeks of development later, the feature launched. And then… crickets. Hardly anyone used it.

Turns out, if they had run just one week of usability testing, they would have realized that users didn’t actually need this feature in the first place.

Instead, they wasted engineering time, lost credibility with leadership, and had to scramble to fix a problem that could have been prevented.

So how do you get stakeholders to see research
as a time-saver instead of a time-waster?

1. Speak Their Language (ROI, Not UX)

When stakeholders push back, it’s usually because they don’t see the value in research. So don’t frame it as “good UX”—frame it as risk reduction.

❌ "We need to do usability testing to ensure a good experience."

✅ "Spending one week on usability testing could confirm whether our assumptions are correct—before we invest three weeks of dev time building something that might not work as expected."

Business leaders care about efficiency and cost. Show them how research reduces wasted work.

Food for Thought: Let's do some quick math. A developer’s salary averages around $70,000 per year. That’s roughly $35 per hour. If a feature takes three weeks to build, with a team of three developers working 40-hour weeks, that’s $12,600 in development costs alone—without considering the cost of fixing or scrapping the feature later. Now compare that to running a usability test with five users, which can cost as little as $200. Which sounds like the better investment?