Understanding Stakeholders Through Research

Designing an effective user experience requires an understanding of the needs of both the business and users and designing a solution that meets them.

In user experience, we often write about and discuss conducting research to understand users and their needs, but have focused much less attention on understanding stakeholders and their needs. This turnaround from a traditional development process—which focused almost entirely on gathering stakeholders’ requirements and gave very little consideration to the needs of users—was once necessary. But perhaps the balance has tipped too far in some cases, with our focus almost exclusively on users’ needs and a lack of adequate consideration or understanding of business needs. Designing an effective user experience requires an understanding of the needs of both the business and users and designing a solution that meets them.

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