Breaking into UX Research isn’t Easy, but Strategically Lucrative
Congratulations. You have a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or a Doctor’s of Philosophy. Now you need to pay for it.
Now you need to pay for it.
Academia may provide a wealth of knowledge – at a hefty cost. Despite the cost, now is the time to apply your education with economic value. Knowledge is not power, unless it is wielded.
This guide will help you avoid the countless pitfalls many face when pursuing a user experience, product management, or technology career – namely UX Research, but applicable to all.
Value needs noticeable evidence. No matter the market, and no matter the competition: if you understand the true value you can grow to provide, mark a clear course towards it, and confidently proceed – you will find yourself in the learning experience of a lifetime.
Time is money. In this economy and job market, every mistake is costly. Applying to your first UX Research job may seem daunting, given the competition.
If you avoid the following mistakes, your resume and interview could be the one noticed.
If you avoid the following mistakes, your resume and interview could be the one noticed.
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
We’ve gone through hundreds of Academia matriculant resumes. Here are the top ten most common mistakes noticed when hiring a UX Researcher.
10. Lacking Self-Awareness
Humans are tone deaf. How do we begin to listen?
The first step of the battle is objectively enumerating every reason an employer wouldn’t hire you: then, moving past them.
If you truly want any role, be brutally honest about yourself. Covering weakness often replaces strengthening it.
Covering weakness often replaces strengthening it.
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
This requires dispassion. Don’t change truth, be changed by truth.
Do you lack research projects?
Do you even know what you’d be doing in a 9-5 full time research job?
Do you understand the role’s deliverables, how they are delivered, and who they are delivered to?
Do you even understand why the role exists, and why a company would pay above the cost of a luxury car each year for you?
These questions are not to demean, but excite. Tackle each unknown about the role as a challenge: a lesson serving as a means to humble us to learn, share, and return value – the core of research.
It’s easy to warp self-perceptions and either give into despair or false hope. Counting zits doesn’t make your entire face red. Ignoring them doesn’t make it clear either.
Target each one with enthusiasm and an action plan, and never ever place your immeasurable human worth in any of this.
Your worth is timeless: an invariable unnegotiable constant never questioned. Your applied economic value, however, can always be iterated. Conflating the two is dooming your worth towards self destruction.
“Lay not for yourself treasures upon earth, where moth and dust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: but lay for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and steal: for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Matthew 16:19-21)
Your worth is timeless: an invariable unnegotiable constant never questioned.
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
Both arrogance and lack of confidence are different versions of misplaced strength. Confidence denotes we confide, or place our strength and faith, in something. Don’t confide inordinately in the self nor in others. Look for the facts. What value have you previously evidenced?
Fresh out of education, you lack the years of industry experience requested in job postings. This is no cause to despair: the quickest means of gaining experience is gaining experience.
A job, the most preferred way to do so, given its compensation, doesn’t outrule that you can still work and demonstrate the skills needed. While job postings should never be taken as accurate, they are an indication of the hiring manager’s amenability towards entry-level and non entry-level. For entry-level roles, recruiters look for clear skill translation.
Have you made your skills easy to translate?
In UX research this includes the ability to think quickly and enact a research plan with measurable impact. Research done for the sake of research is purposeless. Do you understand the translatable and transferable skills you have that appeal to hiring managers?
Let’s learn how to build that self-awareness: a fundamental UX Research skill.
How you can build self-awareness.
Self awareness is built when we divorce the self. Apply every selfish, human thought you own into another role: the UX or Product hiring manager. For aspiring user experience researchers, this level of empathy is precisely practicing what you’ll be doing in your role.
Self awareness is built when we divorce the self.
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
You need to understand the gap – the organizational problem space – to first then realize how your skills can be sculpted to resolve it.
Let’s simulate the role of a Product or UX hiring manager. You are successful, but tired. You are more than a decade after college – perhaps even with children of your own nearing their college years.
You have established product experience across various business to business (B2B) or business to consumer (B2C) companies of various sizes – small to enterprise – and maturities – startup to publicly traded.
Let’s simulate the role of a Product or UX hiring manager.
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
At your current company, it’s time to delegate. You’ve already grown out a design team and design system, but there are so many product managers desiring to see their areas prioritized and pushed to code.
There’s not a clear nor consistently communicated signal pertaining to what users want. You have product feature request submissions, customer churn (loss) reports, and some data – but no one has the time nor bandwidth to look for the patterns: answering – what’s the next thing we should build, and how should we build it?
Your team of designers ends up being told what to build and has to perform its own research to second guess their own assumptions. You just feel that confirmation bias is beginning to present itself – not only across product managers and engineers, but also in your designers – who struggle to justify their design decisions.
At the end of the day, the business is making money – so design is shipped to be developed into code. The developers try their best, but don’t replicate the look and feel of the prototypes – and customers just aren’t as happy.
You really want to build out a research team, but your budget only lets you hire an intern or entry-level position. They finally approve the position, and you start receiving hundreds of resumes. A month passes, and you barely have time to screen all the resumes.
Oh shoot! You now have 900 hundred resumes in your Greenhouse, or other talent acquisition software, to screen and give a thumbs up on for your screeners – who patiently await. One hour and 150 resumes in you arrive at one titled: [Your first name] [Your last name].
You’ve now re-entered the picture, but through the eyes of someone else. Subjectivity has now been translated into objectivity.
How does this person perceive your resume? If you pass, how do they pick you – relative to other candidates? The above process is how you build self-awareness.
You’ve now re-entered the picture, but through the eyes of someone else.
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
9. Failing to Research the Role
Would you hire someone who didn’t even care to understand why you’d want to pay them?
Despite this, many go through the hiring process without doing this. Mistake 10, “Lacking Self-Awareness”, helped illustrate how hopelessly naive us humans can be without bursting our own bubbles. How do we do this? Research.
We can’t tell you how many times – despite a well-worded resume – a candidate will come to an interview with a failure to understand their underlying value proposition, and listening to the company needs.
One of the most ironic tells that a person is ill-prepared for a user experience research role is how poorly they researched the position they apply for. This can be both situational and general. Let’s explore both categories.
How – generally – you should research UXR roles.
Realistically, a discussion with any company member is difficult to acquire before the interview. It’s best to start with a general understanding of the functional requirements of UX research.
UX research exists to answer two questions: are we designing the right thing, and are we designing things right?
These two questions echo design thinking principles, namely the classic double diamond. Here at Valuxr, we take this foundational approach one step further: answering not only product design decisions, but company value decisions.
These same two questions translate into the far more profound, yet lucrative: are we spending resources on the right value outcomes, and are we correctly delivering said outcomes? This affects every single company member, not merely designers, product managers, and engineers.
An Academia matriculant cannot answer these questions. Neither can a seasoned UX Researcher. That’s what strategists and consultants do.
An Academia matriculant cannot answer these questions.
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
Researchers, however, leverage user patterns to expediently answer such questions: applying collection methodologies across quantitative and qualitative practices towards digestible deliverables – like journey maps, personas, readouts, videos, presentations – to ensure investigation moves to insight and impact.
Missing the purpose behind the above processes is key to failure.
How – situationally – you should research UXR roles.
The above general patterns are universally valuable to every industry, but just because a gap or hole needs to be corked doesn’t mean the same approach works.
You need to understand the industry: namely the variables surrounding the job you are applying for. It may seem daunting and tedious to do this across every application, but it is actually an on-the-job skill you are honing.
First, ask yourself:
How does the company I’m applying for make money?
What products and services does it sell to make its money?
What underlying value does it provide to people?
Are these other companies, making it a business-to-business (B2B) company, or to general consumers like myself, making it a business-to-consumer (B2C) company?
If B2B, what industry is this company a part of?
What types of roles in said industry does this company’s solutions or products serve?
First, ask yourself: how does the company I’m applying for make money?
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All these questions should be answered by the company’s publicly available marketing materials – its websites, demos, commercials, social media content, and others. Moreover, on this note: please recognize the user experience and product teams are likely not responsible for the website experience, unless the website is the product making money.
Countless times, interviewees think themselves witty by remarking a website experience to be flawed when, in reality, they are barking up the wrong tree at the wrong time.
The next aspect to research is the organogram, or company structure. Most companies have 5 general groups, or verticals – each headed by an executive: either a “C-level” title or “Vice President” title, sometimes both.
In order of relevance to the UXR role, these are: Product, Technology/Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and Human Resources. There often are other verticals, like Legal, Operations, Security, and others – but we should focus on the functional purpose of said verticals, often with ever-changing names.
Security and Legal ensures the company’s reputation and intellectual property is intact; Operations and Human Resources provide infrastructural means to allow others to fulfill value; Marketing, Enablement, and Sales deliver the value; and Engineering and Product actually create and deliver said value.
Digging into the Product team, you have typical ingredients: Product Managers, User Experience Designers and Researchers, Documentation, and Technical Program Managers.
Product and Technical Program Managers, key stakeholders you will work with, typically don’t manage people, but products. They take chunks of the solutions, or products – sometimes feature-level – and are solely responsible for said chunk’s success.
In some ways, they are “mini CEOs”: providing decisions at every step of the product life cycle. This role must orchestrate user experience, technical, and marketing resources and colleagues. To make decisions surrounding said orchestration, they need research and data. To them, UXR is a needed delegation: a breath of fresh air.
Product and Technical Program Managers, key stakeholders you will work with, typically don’t manage people, but products.
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
Who is the hiring manager? How many product managers are there? What product areas exist? How big is the UX team? How is it structured? How does this all relate back to the company value?
These questions should be asked throughout the entire hiring process for every company. Tools like Google or LinkedIn should get you further than you previously thought possible answering said questions, but the research – or proximity towards empathizing with the unfulfilled value they are looking for – never ends.
That being said, the research is functionless – unless demonstrated.
8. Failing to Demonstrate the Role
Would you hire anyone without evidence they can fulfill what it takes?
The obvious answer to the above is no. How – then – do you demonstrate a role for which you have no experience? Firstly, you likely don’t completely lack experience.
Experience can be both direct and indirect. You have transferrable, indirect, experience in said role.
Where most fail is translating or transferring indirect to direct experiences. The hiring process provides a limited window: both for yourself and the reviewer. Understanding how to best make use of said limited windows is key to climbing through them.
There are typically two phases to hiring: screening and interviewing.
Screening reviews a large sample of resumes to evaluate which candidates are worth taking interviewers out of their work hours.
Interviews are self-explanatory: short samples of attention towards giving a candidate a thumbs up or down and a rationale towards why.
In both of these windows, you need to let in the light. Before you understand said light – you need to evaluate the darkness within: the first step to demonstrating the role.
In both of these windows, you need to let in the light.
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
How to Demonstrate Skills Required for a UX Research Role
Confident humility is the most important demonstrable trait within a UX research role. Are you able to listen? Are you able to notice patterns? Are you able to evidence said patterns towards measurable impact?
All these questions are the very same ones good screeners and interviewers are asking in the backs of their minds. We’ll break this into both the resume and application phase and the interview phase.
The Resume Screening Stage
Countless resumes are scanned to assess role readiness. Don’t obfuscate any skills you have demonstrated with poor presentation. Omit needless words and overemphasis, and cut to the demonstrable facts. Depth is far more important than breadth at this phase.
Don’t lie. Measure. Convey: what you did, why it was done, how it was done, how long it was done, who it impacted, and any associated monetary or numerical impact.
Across all these categories, omit anything that doesn’t translate to the above role-relevant screening questions quantifying “confident humility”.
Convey: what you did, why it was done, how it was done, how long it was done, who it impacted, and any associated monetary or numerical impact.
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
“Researched liver disease” is a terrible way of representing your experience.
“Led and presented 2-year team research project statistically evidencing 20% improved diet-based liver disease recovery in animals, correlated with clinical datasets, and published in Hepatojournal” is a far superior entry for any resume screener.
To the screener, the latter example evidences your capacity to work with data, yet also presents it to humans. It gives a measure of time and deliverable impact.
It conveys teamwork and stakeholder buy-in. It’s also approachable and shows dedication to purpose: the research displays your willingness to learn and deliver evidence-able improvement.
If you can translate all skills, even those that aren’t directly research related, into a similar format: you will not only better understand your past experiences, but how to better approach future opportunities.
Order your experiences intelligently. Do all apply? Put the most relevant skills at the top? Can you breathe meaning into the mundane?
If the meaning is true, and not dishonest, then it will show. If you still lack the demonstrated skills, then demonstrate them. Find stakeholders, a project, a goal, and research it according to a short timeline.
Next, we move onto the interview stage – which merits its own entire section.
7. Displaying Poor Conversational Skills
Talking reflects both thinking and listening. Would you hire a person tasked with communicating empirical empathy when they display none themselves?
Interviews are often billed “old fashioned”. This is especially untrue for a user experience research position: a role requiring succinct, respectful, clear, and accurate speaking. No matter how impressive your research may have been, it has no impact if it isn’t shared.
No matter how impressive your research may have been, it has no impact if it isn’t shared.
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
Most people are disrespectful – intentionally or not. It may be controversial to describe fumbling words, failure to look people in the eye, nervous habits, boring monologues, repeated interruptions, and ignoring a person’s questions as “rude”.
But, deep down, all behaviors disturb all of us because they introduce noise to the signal of interchanged value. Eliminate this noise the best you can, and never disrespect others – even if you are disrespected. Remember where your value lies.
Communication is sharing. Modern technology may have expedited communication, but it has also dampened the quality of our superfluous words.
We talk the talk. But, do we walk the talk? Worst yet, do we listen? Do we empathetically try to understand the walk preceding the words emanating out of the other mouths speaking them?
People are inherently selfish. We want something. Understanding this trait helps us step out of what we want – the job – and understand what the interviewer wants: the job fulfilled. This value exchange is precisely what activates our neurological ability to listen.
Most fail to do so, but demonstrating this will put you ahead of multitudes.
How to Demonstrate the Required UX Research Conversational Skills
Firstly, it is essential to be comfortably and confidently human. This means you are: prone to error, can be personably funny, but also have the recognition that your lowly view can detect the highest of all views – patterns larger than our own lives.
Don’t show any shame in previous errors: rather, display confident strength from lessons learned and your capacity to learn them for the company.
If you achieve the ability to point to the ignored stars and get other heads turned in the same direction – you have succeeded at the interview stage. The interview is a sampling of the value exchange you may provide during your time at the company. If the net returns empty, it is likely you won’t be chosen.
If you achieve the ability to point to the ignored stars and get other heads turned in the same direction – you have succeeded at the interview stage.
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
The first step is understanding the roles of those interviewing you. Preliminary research always helps, asking yourself: what does this person do on a day to day basis? Why? Who do they interact with? How can the role they are interviewing for help them accomplish their tasks? The company’s tasks?
Every interview is bidirectional. You are being evaluated, but you are also evaluating. During the portion where you are allowed to ask questions, continue to build empathy for the interviewer and company. Ask the right questions.
While, “What do you want from me?”, is too direct to respectfully ask, it is on the correct course. “What outcomes do you see UX Research providing a year from now?” hit the mark and also focus on the underlying purpose the role has and how you can potentially grow to make said outcomes a reality. This very question is one you are already answering with your own experiences.
People don’t care about you. They care about how you can bring value. Then they begin to care about you. This may seem harsh, but examine yourself.
Do you have the bandwidth to deeply care for the 7.5 billion individuals on this earth as you may care for yourself? How, then, can you expect the same from a complete stranger who must go through countless candidates.
People don’t care about you.
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
Preemptively show them the care we are prone to discard. Point to the timeless patterns – the stars untouched by shadows – and admire the veracity behind their form together. Make them want to extend their limited half hour or hour to half of their waking hours.
This is done both qualitatively and quantitatively – strung together by conversational reason. Let’s dive into the latter.
6. Not Building Demonstrably Quantitative Experience
Math intimidates people. But, math – derived from the Greek word mathema – fundamentally means “that which is learned”. Would you hire someone who cannot evidence learnings, especially for a research role?
The fallacy most have with quantitative research skills isn’t majorly their Calculus or Statistical familiarity or lack thereof. Most failures lie in people’s discomfort communicating numbers, and also conveying comfort to others potentially lacking said familiarity.
Most failures lie in people’s discomfort communicating numbers.
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
Numbers, like words, are meaningless without representative objects, thoughts, or actions. People can apply numbers to reflect truth or mistruth. Just like words, people can also fumble around with numbers.
Many fail to get the job because they speak completely in numbers or completely in words, failing to understand the objective evidence numerical processes bring to a research role.
How Do I Demonstrate Quantitative Experience?
People fail to realize math is a language. Referencing our article on statistical skill sets all product employees should know, quantitative language has three simple aspects: counting, calculating, and creating.
We count as a means to record and measure. We calculate what we cannot nor care to count. Finally, we create and decide based on what we count and calculate.
Quantitative language has three simple aspects: counting, calculating, and creating.
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These may seem overly simplistic, but these are the purposes math serves. Be it neurosurgery, coding, stock exchanges, space exploration, finances, or tallying up bread for sandwiches – all fall in the above categories. Within these categories, you should demonstrate ease for the purpose behind the numbers.
Quantitative experiences matter because all business objectives and outcomes are measured: ultimately by money. While numbers ultimately lack any and all meaning without their qualitative counterparts – executives make tough decisions.
Numbers ease their worries de-risking said decisions, because it decouples it from potential bias. While we will explore the fallacy of this thinking, you must be able to demonstrate how survey data, analytics, and other quantitative and summative skills triangulate and improve upon qualitative patterns.
The numbers scale the impact of your qualitative findings. Interviewing 3-5 customers may provide terrific evidence and patterns, but lacks robust buy-in without larger quantitative triangulation. This triangulation creates a megaphone: the better the data, the further the reach.
This triangulation creates a megaphone: the better the data, the further the reach.
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
On the job, this triangulation typically comes in the form of surveys and analytics software. While the former is easy to gain experience in Academia, the latter may come with a price tag. Software like Pendo, WalkMe, and FullStory essentially “spy” on how users click or tap on a product.
To the untrained mind, this data might suffice – but the organization and interpretation of it is meaningless without qualitative data.
Megaphones merely convey a message, they aren’t the message. Numbers scale similarly. Let’s explore how most fail to even create this message.
5. Not Building Demonstrably Qualitative Experience
Now we dig into the meat of UX Research, and the areas where people flounder the most.
Underlying every single piece of data and decision behind it is the question, “What’s the point?” If you cannot answer this question, you are applying for the wrong role.
A user experience researcher can and should deliver quantitative data, but the humans representing said data are the bread and butter of what the researcher does.
Can you carry a respectful conversation with a person and glean valuable insights about what they do? Are you comfortable recording these insights, patterning and referencing them to other stakeholders?
Moreover, can you fight for the user?
Can you stand up against bad product decisions and objectively cite collected evidence towards resolution?
Are you able to dive into any industry – from cryptocurrency to cybersecurity and social media – and navigate daunting jargon in almost no time to understand pains and patterns across groups of people?
Can you fight for the user?
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
These are all major skill sets every user experience researcher needs. Moreover, any Academia graduate may unwittingly already have experience in said skill sets, but fail to demonstrate them.
A semester abroad or other unfamiliar circumstance where you detected patterns, and swiftly provided value – or something in return – could easily demonstrate this. But, most fail to do so.
How do I demonstrate qualitative experience?
Understanding human behavior – how to respect it, collect it, and find patterns across it – are key to qualitative skill sets. User experience interviews are unabashedly the most important data collected. How to facilitate and conduct these to glean insights are critical.
A researcher knows when to back off and when to speak up. During a session, we back off. We introduce ourselves to a friendly person who knows nothing, but asks a lot of questions to better understand the interviewee.
We speak less than 10% of the meeting, yet still encourage brutal honesty and reflect and reinforce the voice of the participant.
A researcher knows when to back off and when to speak up.
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
Why does this matter? Because, fundamentally, we are not above these people. We are below them. They understand and encapsulate the answer product teams naturally blind themselves to with inherent solution bias – the notion their product inherently has value.
Demonstrate a qualitative skillset by conveying a synthesized and debiased version of what people have taught you.
What are invariant processes, pains, and desires people had before a solution was tested? How did you capture this? How do you communicate this?
Finally, how does this align or misalign with the product experience? This foundational qualitative storytelling is essential, and leads us into the next common pitfall.
Don’t ever fixate on the design.
4. Emphasizing Design Activities and Aspects
When you hire a designer, you hire a designer. When you hire a researcher, you hire a researcher.
Misunderstanding the differences between both roles is as telling as failing to understand the distinction between a user interface (UI) and a user experience (UX).
We can’t express how many times we’ve seen design skills repeated in a resume for a researcher: a person devoted to asking and answering questions that de-risk decisions made.
Don’t emphasize creating wireframing, mockups, or prototypes. Understand what they are and the distinction between them – sure – but your prerogative is knowing how to test them: from low to high fidelity.
Responsible employers should have no interest in a researcher’s ability to design, but their ability to leverage user insights on said design.
A researcher may feel comfortable testing designs a designer has questions about, but they are not responsible for authoring it.
How do I distinguish between a UX Researcher and Designer?
User experience designers design experiences. User experience researchers inform what experiences to design and how to design them. The above statements may seem self-obvious, but many fail to understand the discrepancies.
This doesn’t mean there is no capacity for creative visual output from a researcher. Artifacts like journey maps, personas, and readouts carry numerous opportunities for visual storytelling.
However, if you are interested in outputting design and research – apply for a design role. If you are interested in solely outputting research – apply for a research role.
Separate both resumes and apply for both roles separately, but do not conflate them.
Your resume will become trite, just as your voice – which is what our next fallacy will unravel.
3. Lacking the Courage to Think on your Feet
Researchers need to be sharp: sensitive yet stable to stakeholder and user input. Would you hire someone charged with asking the right questions, when they lack the cogent confidence to communicate?
Researchers need to be sharp: sensitive yet stable to stakeholder and user input.
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
Thinking on your feet means you understand your functional purpose. Whether or not you consider yourself an introvert or extrovert has nothing to do with the fact that you are being interviewed for a role requiring you to collect and convey.
Researchers de-risk decision making by bringing clarity. Are you honest enough to ask for clarity? Do you also have the stability to not crumble? Do you have the tenacity to respectfully speak up and even debate, based on patterned evidence, to ensure a group does not head in the right direction?
So many interviewees lack this confidence. But caring for the purpose of the role cuts through fear and grants courage to those seeking to actually fulfill the function.
2. Not Evidencing Stakeholder Impact
Without stakeholders, research is meaningless. Just as the CIA is supposed to bring intelligence to military and executive leaders, researchers bring patterned user insights to reduce risk for product decision makers.
While stakeholders with the same industry roles are difficult to find in Academia settings, all researchers with any impact are brought to a decision-maker. Published research informs physicians, politicians, or someone with stake in the research.
There likely was a principal investigator, or someone funding the research that relied on the findings you took part in yielding. How did you convey your methodologies and their results to said stakeholders?
Time and time again, resumes and interviewees overlook this vital aspect of the role. Great, you conducted research. For whom? Why? What was the point? What was the impact?
Ignoring stakeholders is ignoring why the research is needed. Speaking for myself, I have declined so many applicants because they fail to convey how they would share or loop stakeholders into their research collection and impact process.
How can I better reference stakeholders?
Research is a team sport. While you are primarily the person dedicated to ask and answer the needed questions: you are not being paid to satisfy your curiosity.
You are being paid to: collect the most pressing questions, understanding any risks and underlying deadlines; plan, schedule, and facilitate means to collect answers to said questions; invite stakeholders to the sessions; and inform them of the just-in-time answers and the patterned answers in a dedicated readout.
Research is a team sport.
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Think back to your own experiences.
When have you facilitated a team brainstorm, or whiteboarding session, or plan?
When have you collected ideas, questions, and been the catalyst – the facilitator – rather than the leader?
While people putting sticky notes on white boards is the stock image for every UX role, the team nature of the function affects every day within it.
Research requires stakeholder input at every stage of the process. While you have objectively been delegated as someone to find the patterned truth, you likely lack the nuanced industry terms the stakeholder possesses.
Asking them for deep questions only they can ask, then debiasing them and asking them will only deepen the impacts your findings have.
Fundamentally, this speaks to your role’s purpose – the Achilles heel of numerous UX Researcher applicants straight from Academia.
1. Failure to Understand the Purpose of UX Research
The most dumbfoundingly horrific mistake applicants make is failure to understand why a user experience researcher is even needed.
Don’t allow desperation to blind you. Don’t fixate on your desire to get a job – that will come. Instead, ask yourself why the job is needed. Before then, let’s focus on what UX Research isn’t.
What isn’t UX Research?
UX research is not market nor product research, though there are areas of overlap.
User research differs from market research, product research, and business research in that it focuses primarily on the people who glean value from what your company produces. This research is so integral, we rename it value research at Valuxr.
Facilitating market and pricing surveys and customer advisory boards or focus groups alongside market data analysis are translatable experiences invaluable to list in a resume and speak to in an interview; but they are no replacement for user-focused experiences.
Take care to confidently call out these gaps, and describe your enthusiasm to fill them with user testing, ethnography, and other user-obsessed research studies.
The main reason this is critical is user research cuts through all the middle men and gets to the person: the individual – extrapolated across multitudes.
User research gets to the person: the individual – extrapolated across multitudes.
https://valuxr.com/errors-breaking-into-ux-research
Market and product research take important macro views, but they do not especially focus on the micro: the human intrinsic exemplified value in the actual time spent.
What is UX Research?
While multiple hints have been dropped across the article, allow us to summarize the UXR’s purpose:
User research is a catalyst to all product action – bringing timely patterned user data to de-risk decision making.
Straight from Academia, you have the potential to make a profound societal impact. If you circumvent these pitfalls you are already ahead of the pack.
A few months spent studying and demonstrably mining the patterned value, and you are not only on your way to inject societal wealth: but maximize your own.
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