Let's Discuss Impact as a UX Researcher
How do you make an impact when the odds aren't in your favour and the train is already running?
Being a researcher often feels like showing up to a party that's already in full swing. You arrive late, the pizza is cold and you’re surrounded by people who've been hanging out together long before you arrived.
It's not uncommon to join teams where the researcher-to-teammate ratio is 1 to 5 or even 1 to 10. If you're the first UX researcher on the team, the challenge is even greater.
So, how do you make an impact when the odds aren't in your favour?
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Start by Rethinking Impact
We often think of research impact as linear: you do a project, deliver insights, and a team makes a better decision. Done. But that’s the “striker mentality”—scoring goals one project at a time. In reality, impact is rarely that tidy. Instead, consider shifting into “playmaker mode,” where your job is to elevate the entire team’s thinking and decision-making, whether or not you’re directly involved in the play.
Here are four key types of research impact to keep in mind:
🎯 Direct Impact
You run a project that leads to a specific decision. Something concrete changes because of your work. This is the easiest to see and the most satisfying to point to.
🧭 Guidance Impact
Sometimes, you’re not doing the research yourself and you’re helping others do it better. Maybe you help Marketing frame better survey questions or guide Product through their user interviews. When you share expertise and steer teams toward better methods, you’re still making an impact.
📚 Knowledge Availability Impact
You take the time to document, organize, and make existing research accessible. Whether it’s through a central repository, a report library, or a well-organized Notion doc, this kind of impact ensures that insights live on and continue to inform future decisions.
🧠 Accumulated Knowledge Impact
This one’s harder to track but incredibly powerful. The more your organization collectively learns about your users and problem space, the smarter it becomes. Every insight adds to a shared foundation, a shared understanding that guides future thinking.
Practical Ways to Widen Your Impact
For Direct Impact, you’re probably fine. It’s the standard: you go do a project, inform a decision, then you track that impact backwards.
The key is to also nurture the other types of impact.
As I hinted before, you need to switch to ”Playmaker mode”“. Start by extending your expertise beyond just collecting data. You can add value by helping other teams think more clearly and act more confidently.
If someone from Marketing is planning a survey, offer to review their questions. If Product is doing customer interviews, help them refine their learning objectives. Small inputs like these can save entire teams from going down the wrong path.
Another way to create value is by helping people make sense of feedback they already have. Support tickets, app store reviews, and social media comments often contain valuable signals. What looks like random noise to others may reveal patterns to your trained eye. Even better, teach them how to spot those patterns next time.
You can also empower others by creating artefacts they can use without you. Simple guides, checklists or templates can help teams run their own lightweight research while avoiding common mistakes. This doesn't replace your expertise but expands the reach of your influence.
Look for opportunities to advocate for research, whether that’s through informal mentoring, internal talks, or newsletters that share interesting insights. You might even start a regular research snippet series that lives in Slack or email.
You can create an MVP of a central research repository or similar so that findings are easy to find and use. When past insights are accessible, teams don’t need to start from scratch every time.
Building relationships with allies across departments is another powerful move. When you find people who understand the value of research, nurture them. These research champions can spread good practices and advocate on your behalf when you’re not in the room.
Tracking The Impact
Great, so you are moving around, influencing decisions with your research, helping others gather data on their own, you crafted artefacts… but how do you actually track all this?
The answer is (no surprise) a bit complex.
Start by building strong relationships with your teammates. Impact becomes visible through conversations, when someone tells you they used a past insight, or that your input helped shape their approach.
Ask questions like “What influenced that decision?” or “Did anything from past research guide this?” You’d be surprised how often your work is part of the answer, even if no one thought to say it out loud.
Then, get intentional about visibility. If you use a project management tool like Jira, Asana, or Notion, start tagging tickets or tasks that were influenced by research.
It could be as simple as a “Research” tag. This creates a traceable link between your work and the decisions it supports, helpful for both storytelling and scaling your influence. This might require some manual work from your part and a lot of relying on others for visibility, but slowly, you can get there.
You can also track the reuse of your work. If you’ve created reusable resources like templates, reports or a research repository, check how often they’re accessed, referenced, or shared.
If anybody in the team used something in the repo to make a decision, ask them to quote your work, to tag it. Or any way they prefer showing the connection to your output.
Even casual chats like “hey, I reused your framework for this” comments count as indicators of knowledge availability impact. These small moments show your work is living beyond the project it was created for.
And finally, for the most invisible form of impact (accumulated knowledge) look for culture shifts. Are people asking better questions? Is user language becoming part of everyday strategy discussions?
These are signs your work is starting to shape how the organization operates. Try to capture those moments. They may not be tied to a single study, but they reflect a growing shared understanding, which is arguably the highest impact work you can do.
Tracking impact isn’t just about metrics. It’s about recognising the butterfly effects you’ve set in motion and giving yourself credit for the changes you’ve helped create, whether or not your name is on the slide.
In her book “Research that Scales”, Kate Towsey talks about research being perceived as a cost centre. And that the way around cost centres is not proving ROI, but improving its visibility and value perception.
This is what you should aim to achieve with research: you want the organization to perceive its value.
Final Thoughts
As researchers, we have a unique opportunity to shape how an entire organization thinks and works.
Your true power lies not in the reports you write or how many insights you deliver, but in the better decisions you enable. By helping your colleagues think more critically, ask better questions, and stay connected to users, you create an impact that grows far beyond any one project.
So show up. Ask good questions. Share what you know. And trust that over time, your influence will multiply.