Lessons I have unlearned as a UX Researcher in 1 year: Part 2
Letting go of things or thoughts doesn’t just come easy and it requires timely syncing in. So instead of telling you everything in one go, I have divided this piece into two parts. Before you move ahead if you haven’t already I advise you to go check out Part 1 👈🏻 .
For those who have, a small recap of the unlearning from Part 1 helps anyway:
Unlearn 1: You could blindly rely on external recruitment 🤓🕵🏻♀
Unlearn 2: Include all stakeholders in the study 👯♂ 👯♂
Unlearn 3: Research isn’t about problem-solving 🙇🏻♀🤔
Unlearn 4: Practice makes you perfect 🔍 🧙🏻♀
Unlearn 5: Research isn’t as creative as design-design 😏
Now, let’s get to the point of this part 🎯.
Unlearn 6: You don’t need to ‘hence prove’ your insights 👩🏻💼
So now that you have done your research, the time comes to communicate the ground reality to your team. And what happens is quite often their beliefs are being challenged. When we have a delusional reality it becomes difficult to receive things opposite to our beliefs and we get defensive. So the way you communicate your insights plays a very important role. Being even a little arrogant and adamant might just result in a heated argument.
Take away 6: But, you need to be humble and keep-your-calm while presenting. 🌝
Your focus should be to communicate the user stories in the best possible REAL way. Clipped videos of multiple interview sessions, for example, do a really good job. When you see it from your eyes what the user goes through it becomes easier for you to accept. Storytelling always gets everyone interested and videos have that comic element that helps you laugh out on your own mistakes together. Another interesting thing you could do is maybe, make usability comics for your team.
Unlearn 7: Focus just on qualitative and you will survive 👷🏻♀👩🏻💻
Coming from a design and a psychological background I was majorly inclined towards the qualitative side of research. But the more and more I got into it, I realized how important it is to have a basic knowledge of stats and experiment design even if you are a qualitative researcher primarily. I was lucky enough to have built that understanding with the help of the book, “Research Techniques in Human Engineering” — by Professor Alphonse Chapanis. And I would highly recommend it to people who aren’t from the stats or mathematics background.
Sometimes you also end up quantifying your qualitative findings through the method called content analysis. Hence don’t run away from knowing at least the basics of quantitative research. You can read more about the content analysis here: https://www.mailman.columbia.edu/research/population-health-methods/content-analysis
Unlearn 8: You can do away with your narcissistic side 🤡
In college, I was always mocked at for having my own picture as my phone wallpaper. Stupid, isn’t it. I have to accept how narcissistic I was. Now, this job involved thinking about users all the time. Not just this as a researcher you have to ensure that you avoid bringing your own bias while moderating sessions or doing the analysis. I can’t deny this made it tougher to keep my biases aside.
Advice: So if you are just starting out, I would really recommend going back and watching your first few moderated sessions to figure out how leading you were and try to identify where all you brought your own biases.
Unlearn 9: You know it so it’s obvious 💁🏻♀
Many times what happened was I skipped certain insights while preparing reports. But then with a discussion with my manager, I realized there are other stakeholders who are going to be present and although it is known to me not everyone there knows about it.
Unlearn 10: Studying humans perhaps is the best thing eva 💆🏻♀ 😇
Fascination with “human interest” is what drew me into researching on their behaviors, needs, and motivations. Experimenting with humans, sounds cool right? Yeah, I had the same belief until I was introduced to the dark side of doing this 🌚. It is when you have to cold call or send mass emails to people for internal recruitment. You sometimes have to forget that you are human too whether it is people cutting calls on your face or sending terrible responses to your incentive mails. You have to be strong 💪😇💪 to deal with it because the real fun of UX research starts after that.
And that’s a wrap, hope you get out of the trap 😜
Thanks again, Yatin 🙏🏻 for taking out time and patience to answer questions of a young head full of doubts 🙇🏻♀️.
