Agency to in-house: my journey as a UX researcher

Me on a hike, by the coast in Waihiki, New Zealand

In 2010, I started my journey in UX in London. Before that, I used to live in India and worked for about 2 years as a front-end developer. Over the last 12 years, I’ve worked at 2 x digital creative agencies (in India), 2 x UX consultancies and 5 x in-house companies (3 of these were secondments).

It was roughly 3 years ago, I decided to make that switch to an In-house UX Researcher role and started looking for opportunities. Why do you ask? Keep reading to find out…

Benefits of working at a UX agency

I landed my first UX job as a consultant just after completing my Masters. While I enjoyed and learned so much in those early years of my career, over time I knew something was missing. I enjoyed the agency atmosphere, being part of a team who were in the same boat as me, and I particularly enjoyed the variety of projects, learning on the job, and most importantly having access to a pool of senior UX consultants to learn from.

To all those just starting their career in UX, I highly recommend starting at a UX consultancy because...

1. It’s a great place to start, with learning at it’s best! And there’s just so much you can learn. At a UX agency, you have the support of at least one senior team member who coaches you on the project and takes some of the pressure off you. It also meant that I had the opportunity to try out different things within UX (including interaction design and prototyping) before specialising in UX research.
2. Sales and competitive bids inspiring creativity: In both the UX consultancies where I worked, we did not have a dedicated Sales team. As UX consultants, we had to understand what the client needed (research questions), and then prepare a suitable approach that met their needs (as well as their budget and timelines). The competitive bidding process and the resource limitations also make you think creatively when you plan the approach and the outcome.
3. At an agency, every project is different. The variety helped me understand what I liked, whilst also honing my skills suit to each project and building my confidence. Each month or even week I could be running a different type of research approach, for a range of clients and industries e.g. evaluating an e-book reader, measuring engagement and interaction of a second screen app experience that complements a TV programme, understanding how people paid for things, running customer journey mapping workshops for the user groups of a Travel service provider.

Truth be told… The main reason is that I got a job there first, so I didn’t have to choose :) Though I’m really glad I started at a UX consultancy.

Working in an agency: Handy tips

1. There are a lot of challenging times (under-scoped projects, demanding clients, back to back projects, the pressure of deadlines), but these equip you to be prepared in dealing with even more complex projects and senior stakeholders.
2. Selling is hard, and writing proposals does not come naturally. I used to find this process daunting because I initially thought of this as just Sales and not a part of UX. Though over time, I realised that developing an approach and writing a proposal or pitch is like solving a problem for a business — you can do it well if you understand the problem.

Benefits of working In-House

I reached a point in my career where I was no longer satisfied with just landing a new client or project, or going from one project to another. Each time we finished a project, I started to wonder what happened next with it — it felt like dropping something into a black hole and not able to see beyond.

Luckily, during my consultancy years, I had the opportunity to do various secondments where I got to go undercover/masquerade as an in-house UX researcher. Each of these secondments ranged from roughly 3 to 9 months, and gave me a good taste of what it would be like and motivated me, to take the plunge.

More recently I’ve had the experience working in two very different in-house companies as a full-time, permanent researcher. Switching was a good decision and there’s more opportunity to get involved sooner, to collaborate as well as learn from cross-functional teams. Below I’ve gone into more details about my reasons for switching:

1. I get to be closer to the project and have more visibility of the end to end process of the product or service (and not just one snapshot of the product lifecycle).
2. I want to know what impact the research had on the overall project. Or how we could make more impact.
3. I want to work on bigger, strategic projects, so research could make an impact earlier in the process. At a UX consultancy, we rarely got to work on strategic projects or those ‘meaty’ problems. It’s because companies who came to a UX consultancy either didn’t have a UX team of their own and didn’t see the value in doing these types of projects and easily misunderstood UX research to be about just usability testing. Or sometimes it’s because they had an in-house team and saw more value in these types of projects being done internally so the insights and knowledge were more easily retained and shared within and across the company.

Working In-house: Handy tips

1. Get used to the shift in perspectives: As a consultant, I had an external and fresh perspective that I could offer to my clients. As a researcher, this is particularly helpful to be unbiased by any business/team influences.
   However, as an in-house researcher, I have the opportunity to understand the context better, and dig deeper to understand why the business (and my team) has identified something as a problem. A good researcher will accept the biases they have (we all have our biases!) and still conduct suitable and helpful research to uncover user needs.
2. Start asking why: It’s important to take a step back, and start asking why (there’s a book by Simon Sinek about it). This is hard, especially when you’re working on a lot of projects. It also helps team members reframe the problem, business concern and research questions better so we can determine the appropriate research approach. When you’re an agency, to an extent it’s about landing a project with every client that comes knocking (because that’s the ultimate goal for the consultancy). Though when you’re in-house, it’s about being smarter and prioritising where your research will make the most impact.
3. Be more proactive and evangelic: How do you find that variety in-house? Bluntly, how do you keep from getting bored? You need to be much more proactive in-house in seeking new methodologies and new approaches; in an agency, you get presented with different problems to solve in different problem domains, and with wildly varying budgets and client contexts.
   In-house, no matter how customer-centric a company is, not everyone will understand the value in different types of research (well, that’s why they hired you and your team). So you need to evangelise and educate teams about the value of different types of research. It’s easy to end up doing the same type of research all the time without necessarily being mindful of why you’re taking that approach.
4. Trust your experience and be confident: By the time I made my transition to In-House, I was an experienced researcher and I was confident in my skills. I don’t mean to be arrogant, I’m still always learning. But I know about the different types of research approaches that are better suited to different stages of a project (like Christina Li’s blog post, let’s stop talking about just usability testing), and it’s all thanks to my consultancy years and everyone I learnt from over the years. In-house, you’re often the only researcher working with other non-researcher team members. And so, it’s important to be able to say why you chose an approach — and to feel confident in presenting that.
5. Don’t underestimate the power of soft skills: There are also numerous soft skills that you learn when in consultancy: good communication (written and oral), good presentation skills, and project management skills are all super valuable in both environments.

Research as a shared service vs being an embedded researcher

1. Different ways of working: In every company I’ve worked at, I’ve observed and experienced different ways of working. These all come down to different organisational approaches to UX, different levels of maturity, team sizes.
2. Research maturity and resources: All of these can have pros and cons for a researcher. Greater research maturity might mean more resources and research having more clout within the organisation. While I don’t like the idea of Research as a shared service (because it could be like an agency), I also feel that embedded researchers could also mean less autonomy and less of an overview of the bigger picture and strategic projects.
3. Not all in-house teams are the same: Earlier in this article, I talk about taking the plunge when switching to in-house, because there were plenty of challenges too. You might still be a team of one, you might be embedded within a specific part of the product team, or you might be part of a research team. Each of these scenarios will require different approaches and skills, so you can best support your team.

The best of both worlds

My aim is to strive to get the best of both! Though I’m not sure that any of us have found the ideal way of working for in-house researchers just yet.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

And thank you for reading :)