After 22 years in design, I think that the power of research is overrated, while other important aspects are overlooked.If you pick up any iconic digital-design literature or a popular methodology like Design thinking or the Double diamond, their main promise is that in order to create in-demand products, you need to reduce risks through research. This sounds like common sense: lets make a cheap, dummy prototype, quickly test it on users, and validate the idea. This saves engineers expensive time and/or avoids creating products nobodyneeds.If you have an existing product, more advanced designers will also notice that its important to combine qualitative research with quantitative data. Since qualitative research mainly answers the question why, and quantitative research answers what, where, when, and how much, only the combination of both research types gives you a complete behavioral picture and ROI for every sneeze. This is the pinnacle, so to speak, of the modern approach of making informed decisions: improve where it really matters, and dont build false assumptions along theway.Thats thetheory.But in reality (if youre actually analysing the data), it often turns out that despite the obvious improvement in user experience confirmed by your research, the conversion rate of the control version might be higher than the variant you propose. Or, what happens even more often, the experiment may not show any statistical significance at all. In my experience, this happens in more than half of the experiments. Im not talking about CSAT or NPS, God forbid, but about how people vote with their ownmoney.What happened? Was the research not conducted thoroughly enough? Did you lack business context? Looking at the sheer number of experiments successful brands run, I get the feeling that quantity is what truly matters (700/week at Airbnb, 1,000 parallel tests for Booking.com, 100200/month at FloHealth).Or heres anotherstory:A product team turned to consultants from BCG, McKinsey, PwC, Accenture (pick your favourite), and for a sum with many zeros, they produced a 200-page research report that has everything: 360-personas, relevant in-depth user interviews, business context considerations, analysis of direct and indirect competitors, as well as a breakdown of current product errors. With their crme de la crme insight on top, that the product should be yet more user-centric (a real case). Followed by a list of mismatched mental models and violated patterns. After all, its so valuable for your users that the shopping cart is in the top right corner, and the product page has social proofs. And all this has already helped their 1,000 clients from the Forbeslist.Full of confidence, you implement these changes, and then crash into realitythe metrics didnt move at all. Users simply dont care about your changes: they might be concerned about the price, the weather, or other factors beyond your control. Or they might be motivated enough to go through a broken flow better than a new one simply because they love the product. Or they recently read a negative article before making a purchase decision. The wider the audience and the deeper the funnel, the broader the range of these potential causes.Whats the matter then? Did researchers confuse behaviour with intention? Misinterpret the data? Hire the wrong respondents?So what is the main problem with research?I believe the main problem is that research shifts responsibility for decisions from designers to users. We cover our asses with these studies instead of realising a simple fact: we cant influence everything. And things are chaotic beyond Figmascreens.Researchers spend weeks detailing personas with their motivations, fears, and needs priorities. Where the pain number 1 is 15% weaker than pain number 2 for industry X. Then the designer, full of confidence, places the icon with pain number 2 before the icon with pain number 1. Behold, the quintessence of design! Stakeholders are ecstatic, you can start preparing your case study and asking for apromo.Because of research, designers choose the more obvious resolutions instead of doing something innovative or truly cool. Instead of bold solutions, they just cycle through another set of recommendations and checklists from Medium or (now) ChatGPT. And theres nothing more mind-corrupting than desk research, which transforms all apps and websites into the same thing. But more on that, anothertime.Any modern engineering methodology is cyclical, but no one explains what to do if you get stuck in this cycle without any meaningful changes.The reason for this is design education, which doesnt teach a few keythings:Research often takes up a significant part of design education, creating false expectations for designers. However, daily routine here requires a different set of skills: facilitation, negotiation, entrepreneurship, working within constraints, understanding front-end and back-end tech, designing logically connected and cohesive UI, attention to details, quality, and a strong commitment to your principles.The quality of hypotheses and their interpretation directly depends on the quality of experience. And to get this genuine experience requires years of hard work, tears and sweat (ideally with a mentor). This genuine experience simply cant be be achieved if you spent entire time drawing Dribbble crypto dashboards. This is why beginner designers often consider any positive or negative feedback from a respondent as aninsight.Research doesnt guarantee good design. Dozens of times I saw how having research ended up with dull or even bad execution.Doing research, you fall into a vicious cycle of validating hypotheses and evaluating prototypes. First, you validate the general idea, then you check the final execution (through, for example, user interviews or pilot launches). Metrics didnt move? Then we go for a second round, then a third, and so on. A small feature can take years of polishing without any clearresults.Nobody gives a damn about design. We ourselves created this mystical image of design, that is both about architecture, business, art, and psychology. Yes, design is somewhere between disciplines and rarely has clear boundaries. But if you look at successful designers, they all have one thing in common: they reason from a business perspective, not from the perspective of user advocates. Taking such a role, which seems even further from the discipline, makes it easier to prove yourpoint.More or less developed businesses are complex: mobile team(s), web team(s), marketing and sales, support, etc. When designing for something bigger than a garage startup, youll undoubtedly face the problem that you have little influence on anything. And thatsF-I-N-E!Right now theres too much informational noise from experts who are fighting for your attention and telling you how to do design the right way. In my experience, real experts dont even have the time to share their knowledge. And even when they do, these voices just drown in a ton of informational clickbait.Even if something was effective somewhere, it doesnt mean it will work elsewhere. Experience is extremely contextual because it takes into account many factors and systems dependencies.Exposure to visuals is a double-edged sword. I.e. the more you look at how it should be done, the higher the chance youll copy it with nofilter.A couple of tips at theend:The bigger the change you make, the higher the chance of moving the metrics needle. But the bigger the change, the less its clear what exactly influenced the success. And all those stories about how a button color improved conversion by 400% are just fairy tales that adult designers tell to young ones at bedtime. Next time, take a closer look at who publishes these successful experimental data99% they are marketing agencies trying to prove their value thisway.Improvements are typically measured in relative terms, but remember that a 40% increase in a conversion rate with an initial value of 0.01 will result in 0.014. Therefore, adequately evaluate your success and look at the problem comprehensively; perhaps the issue is deeper or not in that place atall.Its often better to quickly release a feature or product to find out if its really needed, than to spend too much time on research and be full of doubts. Good product managers simply have The Vision and gut feeling (aka genuine experience), and this turns out to be more important than everything else.Try designing something without looking at how others do it, and youll be surprised by how difficult it is the firsttime.Dont forget about context. What are the usage conditions? What job does a person hire your app for? How many other interconnected elements are in the system? Very often, adoption, funnel, and content issues can literally be understood on a common-sense level.Research with real users is helpful, especially if youre a beginner designer. It can help you quickly eliminate interface friction and understand user expectations. Or it might not help . The key words here are real users and beginner designer, which together can give an unpredictable result. But as soon as a designer stops being a beginner one, they quickly begin to notice that users say what they already know.I also dont want to ignore the fact that research is convenient for creating the appearance of professional work. Weekly highlight reels of your users struggles serve as a great reminder to your managers of why they need a UX designer.Aesthetics doesnt work without execution. Better think about who youre designing for. For your portfolio? For other designers? Or for your audience?Dont confuse what you wish for with what you actually do, and be humble. Its possible that something has improved not because of your changes: maybe its due to a better acquisition source, or improved apps performance. Design is a team discipline where both business and engineers have the right to be heard. After all, whats important is being able to work together to achieve common goals and enjoy life along theway.Sometimes its just luck. But next time, try looking not at the personas, but at the positioning, for example. How saturated is your market with competitors? What are their weaknesses? Is this really the rightniche?After finishing this essay, I realised that it all sounds too provocative. Obviously, talking to your users is beneficial, but my point is that it shouldnt be the core of our craft. This especially applies to desk research and AI-generated artefactsboth of these methods are just a copy-paste of someones thoughts, which are a copy-paste of other ideas without any context and critical thinking. Yes, methods like contextual inquiry help understand the context, and usability interviews help remove snags and convince some managers to make right UX decisions.But what to do if, after all, your sales are still low, and metrics havent moved? After a couple of researchdesignresearchdevelopment cycles, you inevitably ask yourself: Is this research really that important?The real problem with research was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.