UX research allows teams to deeply understand the needs and motivations of customers. It is important to define how we will take action once we gather this new knowledge. In this article about empathy, Baruch Sachs defines three broad approaches to actionable empathy:
Empathy to solve real problems
Empathy to innovate
Empathy to manipulate
Be careful when a team/stakeholder goes into a research study wanting to understand: “how do we make our users do x”? That question dangerously flirts with using research to manipulate behavior. Organizations will not be successful if they try to force a solution on a customer.