A day in the life of user researcher, Andrea Krndija
I’m Andrea, and I work at Habito as a User Researcher.
I joined in 2016 to lead the frontlines of Habito: our Customer Experience team. In the past three years, I’ve spoken to thousands of people. Some were curious about what we do, some needed help, others just wanted to chat! I have many stories to tell… but we’ll leave those for another time.
Earlier this year I was given the opportunity to become our first User Researcher, and I grabbed it with both hands! There’s now two of us, and I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve been out of my comfort zone since day 1. There’s so much to learn. It’s a good feeling… most of the time!
Research analysis and reporting is kind of like detective work, or at least I’d like to think so. You write down all the things that came out of a research session and spread them all out on every available surface. You stare at them for a long time. You write notes after notes after notes and watch the dots start to connect. Kind of like in the movies when they connect pieces of evidence with red string on the wall.
We also have to move fast, because there’s always more research to be done, but without sacrificing the quality of our work. And just like movie detectives, the stakes are high. Sure, we’re not keeping bad guys off the streets, but our job is still to help real people, and our insights support all the work our teammates in Product, Design and Engineering are doing.
We know that mortgage applications are incredibly stressful — two-thirds of UK homeowners suffer from mortgage stress — a staggering 5.4 million people. More than a third (35%) of people polled said they lost sleep during an application, with the average amount being 7 hours! We don’t want to build things that don’t solve our users’ problems, after-all, we’re here to make mortgages easier. So user-research is key to identifying what these problems are, like stress, and testing different solutions.
Writing a day in the life is a challenge — no two days are the same. But to give you an idea, I’ll tell you about my day today.
We started by our research wall, where we plan what we’re doing and what’s coming up next. It feels great to mark tasks as ‘Done’… even though the to-do list doesn’t actually get any smaller!
The morning was reserved for our first Habito Go research workshop (we’re already planning the next one). In the workshop, we bring together designers, mortgage experts, and engineers to find out what everyone thinks we know and don’t know about our users. It’s important to get everyone on the project involved in the whole process, although I’m currently struggling to find a meeting room available for next week!
Just like that, it’s lunchtime. After that, I’m interviewing a designer. I take a glance at their CV but I’m more interested in hearing about what makes them tick.
The afternoon is reserved for more documentation. I like to sit in one of our breakout areas and put my feet up when I need to focus. I prefer to listen to music (thrash metal is great for productivity — you’re welcome), but usually, I turn on noisli.com when writing.
I’m rushing to wrap my day up by the usual 6pm finish and go to the gym. I need to spend all my energy or my brain won’t let me sleep.
And that’s it!
