The top challenge facing UX teams in enterprise organizations is securing resources or budget, with 60% of our survey respondents grappling with the complexities of just being able to afford to *do* user research.

This is according to our brand new State of UX in the Enterprise 2018 report, hot off the presses this week.

In mid-2018 we reached out to experience professionals at organizations with more than one thousand employees to participate in the report. Our final sample size is 204 participants from global, enterprise-level companies representing a range of major industries.

Download the full 46 page report now to understand the overall state of UX research in the enterprise in 2018 and all our survey results. You can also discover how enterprise UX teams are organized and aligned, the frequency that UX research is performed on enterprise properties and their competitors, and the most common sources of knowledge and tools for UX teams.

In the meantime, let’s take a quick look at one of the key revelations…

Top challenges for UX teams in enterprises

As mentioned above, budgetary and resource restrictions are the number one challenge faced by 60% of our respondents. Following close behind is integrating UX research into design and development (57%). It seems that even when UX research is being done, there are still issues around even getting that research into the product.

Next comes the thorny issue of stakeholder buy-in, with 48% of respondents struggling to communicate the value of UX to many of the people who control budgets and resources.

For a wealth of guidance on this subject, take a look at our how to communicate the value of UX guide, featuring 25 different UX experts, offering advice ranging from showing tangible based evidence, to recommending different communication techniques, to generally being more empathetic.

The fourth biggest challenge for UX teams is sourcing the right participants (45%), and this is something we’ve worked really hard over the last couple of years to improve for researchers. Our participant sourcing capabilities are now the most comprehensive in the marketplace, you can leverage your own users for free or have access to over 120 million users worldwide. We also include self-service screeners and automated participant sourcing for all study types across a number of countries.

At the bottom end of the list are ‘collaborating with developers’ (34%), ‘lack of functionality with existing tools’ (23%) and ‘access to tools’ (22%).

So this means that getting access to useful and well-integrated tools isn’t that big of a problem for most of our respondents, and as you can see, there are plenty of great UX tools available. However the biggest issues are all around education and the need to properly communicate the value of UX research to stakeholders and the C-suite.

For the rest of the survey results, download our full 46 page State of UX in the Enterprise 2018 report.