Making research pay: Alex Burke and the case for proving UX value

It is a quietly subversive thing to say to a room full of user-experience professionals: that being right about your users is not, on its own, enough. Yet that is the uncomfortable centre of Alex Burke's public argument. Burke is the chief executive of Optimal Workshop, the Wellington-born platform that thousands of teams use to test how people actually navigate and understand a product. He has spent the better part of two decades building digital businesses, and the case he now makes is aimed squarely at his own industry: research has to earn its keep. It has to become a measurable business investment rather than a virtue everyone professes and few can defend on a balance sheet.

That argument has a number behind it, and the number is bracing. In Optimal Workshop's own 2024 study of the state of user research, the company reported that only about 16% of organisations had fully embedded UX research into their processes and culture, and that more than half, some 56%, did not measure the impact of that research at all. The conclusion the company draws is blunt: there is a gap between what organisations say about being user-centred and what they can actually demonstrate. As Optimal Workshop put it, this "disconnect between intention and implementation underscores the challenges in demonstrating and maximizing the true value of user research."

Why "prove it" is the harder ask

The pitch for user research has always been easy to make and easy to forget. When budgets tighten, the work that cannot point to a line in the numbers is the work that gets cut first. Burke's framing, articulated through Optimal Workshop's research and his appearances on the conference circuit, is that the discipline's survival depends on closing that loop: not just running good studies, but tying them to outcomes leaders already care about, and measuring whether they moved.

It is a notably commercial way to talk about a craft that often prefers to talk about empathy. But it is consistent with where Burke has spent his career. He is, by his own account, on his third turn as a chief executive, and the through-line is not design for its own sake; it is building and scaling businesses that have to make their case to customers and boards. Seen that way, "prove the value of research" reads less like a slogan than a habit carried over from running companies: ask what a thing is worth, and be honest when the answer is "we don't know."

Tomorrow versus today

The second idea Burke keeps circling is a tension every product organisation lives with: how to design for tomorrow while still shipping for today. It is the title of a session he hosted at UXDX EMEA 2024, "Design for Tomorrow vs. Design for Today", in conversation with Jod Kaftan, then head of product design and research at Oracle. The framing is a debate rather than a verdict: should teams pour their scarce attention into long-horizon, future-facing work, or into the practical, immediate improvements that earn their keep this quarter?

The session laid out the forces that make the future-facing answer so hard to choose in practice, short chief-executive tenures that reward this year's revenue, the gravitational pull of technical debt and a crowded backlog, and the organisational politics of getting other teams to buy into a vision whose payoff is years away. The suggested way through has more to do with smuggling foresight into the work that is already happening than with grand strategy: embedding it in live projects rather than standing up separate "innovation" initiatives, and building alliances with the people elsewhere in the business who share the appetite. It is a pragmatist's account of idealism, and it rhymes with the value-of-research argument. Both are about making the case for work whose returns are real but not immediately legible.

An interviewer first

One honest thing to note about Burke's public profile is how much of it consists of him drawing out other people. He is a recurring host and interviewer in the UXDX conference series, and the pattern is consistent: he takes the chair, not the lectern. He interviewed Daniela Jorge, the chief design officer at Capital One, at UXDX USA 2025 on the role of design across an organisation; he hosted Romain Berthomé, head of product at Booking.com, at UXDX EMEA 2026 on scaling product teams across borders. The recurring brief is the same one his own company's research keeps returning to, how design and research earn a seat at the table where the business decisions are made.

It makes him a slightly unusual subject. There is no single quotable bombshell here, no manifesto line he is famous for. What there is instead is a consistent editorial instinct, a chief executive who chooses, again and again, to put the value-of-research question to the people best placed to answer it, and to let their answers do the arguing.

The builder behind the platform

Burke did not arrive at the value-of-research question from inside a research lab. He arrived at it as an operator. He led the digital consultancy Tigerspike for some eleven years, long enough to see it earn a run of Deloitte Technology Fast 50 recognitions, before it was acquired by the outsourcing group Concentrix, which announced the deal in 2017. Tigerspike's "Catalyst" practice, its problem-solving arm for digital products, sits in that lineage. He then took the top job at Education Perfect, the education-technology company, before moving into the chief-executive seat at Optimal Workshop.

That résumé is the quiet engine under everything else. Optimal Workshop began, nearly two decades ago, by building unglamorous but essential tools, card sorting and tree testing, the methods teams use to work out whether people can actually find their way around a product. It has since grown into an enterprise research platform used across government, banking, technology and aviation, and counts large consumer brands among its customers. Running a company like that, Burke is selling research tools to people who themselves must justify a research budget. His insistence that the work be measurable is not an abstract position. It is, in the most literal sense, his business model.

That may be the most useful way to read Alex Burke. He is not the lone visionary the conference format flatters. He is the operator in the room who keeps asking the unsentimental question, what is this worth, and can we show it, and who has built, hosted and run his way into a credible right to ask it. In a field that has spent years arguing that it deserves a seat at the table, he is making the less comfortable case: that the way to keep the seat is to put a number on it.