Experience research helps an organization learn about other people so it can respond to their needs, perceptions and personalities more thoughtfully. The hope is that the research will turn up some new tidbit or constellation of tidbits (sometimes dead simple, sometimes complex) that so far everyone else has overlooked.

These insights, as we usually call them, enable the organization who commissioned the research to gain first-mover status is addressing and satisfying unmet needs, or in finding better ways to satisfy needs.

Experience research also helps us form clearer images of the types of people will use a design. These images — usually in the form of personas — serve a number of purposes. They both inspire and guide team members’ intuition during ideation and design. They are also a valuable critical tool, useful for reality checking design approaches at the macro- and micro-level, and for assessing the probable effectiveness of candidate concepts and designs in order to narrow the possibilities to the most promising (hopefully prior to testing).

The primary use of experience research is to inform experience strategy and experience design to help organizations provide better customer experiences. Better how? Better, as defined by the customer. Why? Because if the customer thinks the experience is better, the customer will 1) in the near-term behave in a way that profits the organization (support the business strategy), and 2) the organization will earn the loyalty of the customer (build brand equity).

This view of experience research and experience strategy and design is, to the best of my knowledge, the predominant one.

This vision of experience research/strategy/design is inadequate. Something elusive but essential is omitted.