Building for People: The Architecture-to-UX-Research Connection

As UX researchers with backgrounds in architecture and urban design, we’ve experienced some powerful parallels between the two fields. Here’s how our architecture work uniquely prepared us for UX.

By Maude Baggetto, Kimberly Voisin, Blake Weber, and James Moustafellos

What do building the world’s tallest skyscrapers and designing future urban environments have in common with creating products at Meta? Well, a lot more than you might think! In our prior lives, the authors of this piece worked as researchers in the fields of architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture, helping to create open spaces and parks, innovative office environments, signature buildings, and cities. We focused on creating exceptional, people-centered experiences in the physical realm.

Becoming researchers in a new space, especially a digital one, felt intimidating at first. But it came more naturally than we anticipated. Our backgrounds in spatial design uniquely prepared us for UX research, and we’ve found our skills to be highly useful and valued.

This note will highlight the commonalities and differences between researching in the architectural world and in the tech world. It’ll also explain how three Meta UX researchers translate their spatial work skills into creating compelling digital products. If you’re considering a similar transition, we hope our ideas will inform your journey.

What’s similar?

Our move from architecture into tech was eased by numerous cross-industry similarities we’ve discovered along the way. Most notably:

Focusing on people’s needs and problems

People are at the heart of each discipline. The best solutions in either industry are rooted in a deep understanding of people’s problems and needs. As a result, researchers in both fields use many of the same methods. We’ve noticed significant overlap in fieldwork and observational research as in architecture, visiting the project site and observing how people behave in similar spaces provide important design inputs, similar to ethnographic UX research. Conducting interviews with community members to gather local knowledge is the equivalent of user interviews. In both architecture and UX, research questions, constraints and timelines dictate method selection. In both worlds, research can range from foundational work to tactical work.

Shaping the future

Researchers in both fields present visions of the future. Whether it’s reimagining an entire city block or shaping the five-year vision for a product, researchers help generate and validate a path forward. To do this, researchers explore future and emerging trends, come to understand people’s needs and behaviors, and collaborate with their teams to push the boundaries of current thought.

Examples of research questions:

• Architecture: How can we reimagine a modern library where paper books are obsolete and everything is digitized?
• Tech: How can we offer a great multigenerational family reunion VR experience?

Multidisciplinary collaboration

Both industries are complex and require expertise from a wide range of disciplines. In both fields, researchers must collaborate and influence across multi-disciplinary teams to ensure their work informs the project direction.

Disciplines on typical teams:

• Architecture: Architects, Urban Designers and Landscape Architects (similar to Product Designers), Civil Engineers (similar to Software Engineers), Project Managers (similar to Product Managers) and clients (similar to internal business partners).
• Research: Product Designers, Software Engineers, Product Managers and Business partners.

What’s different?

The worlds of architecture and UX research also differ in a key way that has far-reaching effects on how research programs are run.

Physical places are more permanent and more time-intensive to construct. After construction, structures often remain in place for decades. Think of NYC’s Chrysler Building or Dubai’s Burj Khalifa — while these structures have evolved over the years, their core remains unchanged. Conversely, digital products can quickly adapt and evolve.

The permanence of physical places leads to longer timelines — buildings can take years to build — and a more taut design process. Due to construction documentation and approval requirements, once plans are submitted, there’s little room for experimentation along the way.

In tech, pilots and experiments for new products and designs happen much more quickly, and often multiple times before and after products are live. This is largely due to the malleability and speed at which software projects are built. UX researchers have more opportunities to study and influence experiences before and after products launch. Adapting to the flexibility of ongoing iteration and relative ease of product changes, was the most significant adjustment between the two fields.

Our superpowers

As we’ve grown into our UX research roles, we’ve found that some of the skills we developed in our first careers are superpowers in our second.

Problem solving and moving between scales

When designing for the physical world, we had to consider people’s experiences across a wide range of scales, from the door handle in someone’s hand as they enter a skyscraper to the sense of wonder they experience when entering the building’s atrium.

From macro ideas to micro details, considering and moving between various scales is important here at Meta, too. As UX researchers, we must ask about the larger product story, its context, and how the finer details work together. (Our scale-shifting work often brings to mind Charles and Ray Eames’s classic Powers of Ten video.)

Working within complex systems

Building and researching for the physical world requires knowledge of all the pieces of a complex system. For example, consider the many elements needed when designing cities: transit systems, sewers, power lines, parks, greenways, and waterways. Working with multilayered systems is also critical in tech, with its various dependencies across different systems and flows.

Having the skills to work in and study how complex systems fit together allowed us as UX researchers to critically analyze and understand how tech products work. This has translated into mapping complex user flows and identifying opportunities for interoperability across products.

Telling clear and compelling stories

When building new experiences, whether digital or physical, developing and selling the vision for the future is vital for inspiring and aligning teams. Our experience in crafting clear and compelling stories in the physical world has made us particularly strong at inspiring and influencing teams in the digital world. Storytelling is key to how we influence teams to translate research insights into actionable product thinking and strategy.

A strong foundation

A lack of tech experience isn’t a barrier to becoming a great UX researcher. UX researchers come from a wide variety of backgrounds, including not only architecture but also traditional social science backgrounds such as sociology, economics, political science, and psychology. We might be a bit biased, but we think our work in architecture, with its focus on designing spaces for people, served as ideal preparation for our current work helping to improve people’s experiences. And as the metaverse takes shape, we expect that the connection between architecture and UX will only become stronger.

Authors: Kimberly Voisin, Maude Baggetto, Bpweber13; UX Researchers at Meta, and james moustafellos; Research Director at Meta.

Contributors: Kim Brink and Blaze Owens; UX Researchers at Meta.

Illustrator: Drew Bardana