From Sociology to UX Research
“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.”
– Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Making a career pivot to UX research is hard work, and surprisingly, my background in sociology hasn’t made this transition any easier, considering UX research borrows heavily from social sciences research methods. Having struggled myself as I endeavoured to define my own career path, I want to share with you the struggles that I encountered in defining my own career path as a sociology student and the story of how I discovered UX research. I hope aspiring UX researchers coming from similar backgrounds will find this article useful.
The Missing Piece
What I struggled with the most when I started out to look for a job after college was, well, it was very difficult to pinpoint how to translate my skills and talent in working out abstruse theories into a practical role in the job market.
My safe bets were data science, law school, or Ph.D. UX research did not end up on that list because I wasn’t aware of this field.
UX research remained an unknown foreign land on my career exploration map for the next 3 years until 2020, the year I graduated from my master’s program.
Looking back, I realize, UX research has been the missing piece to the puzzle. It didn’t exist as a career option when I made the decision to apply for graduate school in 2019.
My college friends seemed to have more of a clear idea of what they wanted to do. Some majored in business; others majored in economics, statistics, etc. I remember in my senior year, I met a young woman at one of my sociology classes. She also majored in sociology, but she shared with me that she planned to do a computer science minor because it’s easier to find jobs.
When I went to career fairs, I felt disconnected and struggled to find anything relevant to my skills. The best I could find were teaching English and business consulting, but none sparked my interest.
Thinking about it now, it’s very surprising that there was so little mention of UX research as a career option when I was a student in sociology, although there are so many similarities between UX research and sociology. Even as I tried to search for options after graduation, it still felt like swimming in a giant ocean with an abundance of options. I knew I could make a case for advertising, for instance, but it felt far off. All I knew was I was passionate about research and sociology, and the closest path that I could think of was to apply for grad school.
The anxiety of defining my own career path became real when I was waiting for my grad school application decisions. I stayed with my parents in China then. It was a very anxiety-inducing period. As rejection letters started to pile up, my parents became increasingly worried about me not being able to get accepted to any graduate programs and started to persuade me to look for jobs in China.
When I finally used my parents’ referral and asked the connection about any opportunities to work at their organization, they were surprised that I would even consider working at their organization. They seemed to think I’m capable of something much better. It was a strange thing to be told when I had little clue about where I could work. But luckily, before this anxiety became too taxing, I received the welcome package to University of Chicago’s graduate program. What a relief, I thought. I could finally have some peace and go back to study again in the US.
An Accidental Discovery
Going to graduate school was a wonderful, albeit strange, experience during the pandemic. My graduate program was short but packed with best-of-class research training in the social sciences. I needed to take classes in theory and methods, write a master’s thesis, think about my next step, and somehow figure out all these in one year.
But things quickly turned around. As I started to understand what it took to do academic research, I realized I was not yet committed to academic research and a Ph.D. route. This actually made things easier because crossing out one path opened up multitudes of possibilities. Life started again, and now in a different direction. I started to apply for positions and go to career fairs with the goal of finding a position in data analysis while wrapping up my MA thesis.
And I suppose what happened next is the anticlimax of my story. Three months into my job hunt, a random encounter with a recruiter on LinkedIn officially kicked off my career in UX research. The recruiter was looking for a candidate to hire for a mixed-method UX researcher role. The actual job interview didn’t land me the offer, but it gave me a peek into what this field was about, and that’s how I first encountered UX research. Not through conversations with career counselors or career conferences at school, but through a totally random encounter with a tech recruiter. This unfolded a whole new chapter in my life. I cared not about the results of the job interview because what mattered was that I discovered a new land, but at the same time, I found it familiar and inviting.
Filled with excitement about my discovery, I started to look for resources to learn more about UX research. I took UX research courses on LinkedIn Learning and Coursera. I also started to leverage what I learned through leading projects when I found out that founders at the start-up where I interned were interested in doing a UX research project to validate their value propositions.
Building My Story as a UX Researcher
But once I decided to start a career, I realized that although I knew about the similarities between UX research and sociology, the recruiters that interviewed me, especially recruiters vs. UX research managers, didn’t understand the connections between my major and UX research. They might have been looking for candidates who had a major in Human-computer interaction or psychology, etc. The relevance of Social Science to UX research was less understood from recruiters’ perspective, esp. for agency-filled contractor positions.
So it became apparent to me that I needed to translate my skillsets to recruiters and share that not only was my graduate research experience relevant to UX research, but it’s also an invaluable addition to my training as a UX researcher.
For instance, I tried to translate my research projects at grad school into UX research projects both on my resume and during job interviews. When describing a research project during an interview with a recruiter, I tried to break it down into three sections: the goal (what I set out to study), the what and why (what I did and why I chose particular research methods), and the results (implications of research). In my current job, I find that we follow similar structures when delivering research findings, which is not surprising.
Bringing experience with research methods is great if you have done research in grad school using these methods. Perhaps the most common methods used in UX research are usability tests, interviews, and surveys. If you have any research projects where you can directly speak to these experiences, it will be a great addition to your UX research repertoire and definitely something you should bring up in your job interview.
In my MA thesis, I didn’t draw on surveys or interviews, so I tried to bring up my internship experience with the startup, where I did customer interviews and other UX research projects I did with non-profits that could help demonstrate my familiarity with qualitative research since that was my focus during the job hunt.
Resources for Your UXR Journey
I hope you find inspiration in my story, and I hope my article has sparked some interest in learning more about UX research.
To learn more about UX research methods and when to apply them, I encourage you to check out Nielsen Norman Group’s article on When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods. I would also recommend you check out Aona’s YouTube Channel, which shares many great tips on how to start your career as a UX researcher as well as on how to prepare for job interviews.
I mentioned qualitative research in the last section. However, if you are interested in learning about quantitative UX research and what that encompasses, I recommend you check out this doc by Chris Chapman, which gives a good overview of its role requirements.
There are also many ways to keep up with the rest of the research community. Joinlearners.com is a great resource. They host annual UXR conferences and their next conference is in June this year. Research slack communities, such as Research Ops+, are also great places to meet awesome people.
Lastly, I would also encourage you to connect with UX researcher alumni in your network. These conversations are excellent ways to understand more about the day-to-day work of a UX researcher.
I’m happy to share more about my experiences and maybe some tips on preparing for job interviews in future blog posts.
Happy reading and keep learning! Until next time!
My special thanks to Monica Bajaj and Vidhya Ranganathan for inspiring me to write my own story; my thanks to Pavi, who has been my emotional support in making this article possible. I also want to thank Matthew Pereira, Carolyn, April Cheng, and Anshuk Chhibber for their candid feedback on my drafts. You rock!
