How to be a kick-ass UX researcher

In this article I am going to share my journey so you too can learn how to be a kick-ass researcher. I have learned a few things on in my career over 10+ years and hopefully it will inspire some or just be a good story to others.

Passion and Purpose

I grew up in southern India, part of a wonderful family with a lot of women — I have a sister, my mother has 3 sisters and my grandmother had 7 sisters. As women, we supported each other, heard each other out and understood the importance of empathy in rewarding relationships.

I completed my undergraduate degree in Engineering in India and left to pursue a graduate program in Engineering at SUNY, Buffalo in New York. One of the tracks in the Engineering program was Human Factors or knowledge of human abilities and limitations to design systems, organizations, products, services, etc. for safe, efficient, and comfortable human use. I was attracted to it as it appealed to my empathetic and problem solving side. Bringing me to the first point about how to be a kick-ass researcher or be good at anything you choose to do: you should want to do it badly and it should be something that comes naturally to you.

Purpose is when you know your work is meaningful to others and you are making a difference. My purpose is to help people get the jobs they want done easily. Another purpose is defining the vision of what an ideal product looks like for customers so that all employees can rally behind a common north star vision of a product. Many people associate user research with usability and improving the ease of use of current products but user research also means identifying customer trends and building on those trends (what does our north star look like and how do we measure it).

Passion and purpose are critical but I also want to emphasize other soft skills that are key to being a kick-ass UX researcher: curiosity, creativity, perseverance, emotional intelligence, collaboration and communication skills.

Curiosity, Creativity, and Perseverance

Let me explain this with a story from my life. I graduated from SUNY Buffalo eager to get a job but returned to India as my grandmother was not well as her Alzheimer’s had worsened. She passed away 3 years later and I am so glad to have spent that time with her.

I joined a consulting company, Infosys, as their first UX researcher. I literally learned how to conduct user research on the job. There were so many questions I had and without any other research guidance at the company I had to find answers which brings me to the importance of curiosity, perseverance and creativity. One of the tasks I was asked to do was to train all designers to conduct heuristic evaluations (a user research method). It was very challenging as there were no standards on how to measure heuristic expertise but with perseverance, curiosity and creativity I was able to define and measure heuristic expertise to create the first-ever measure for heuristic evaluations (HEQS). Perseverance encouraged me keep working on this for 2+ years without guidance, curiosity made me read on many other topics of measurement and apply it to a new context, and creativity made me find unique ways to apply other measurement techniques to the subjective heuristic evaluation method. In the end, it was a big deal as Jakob Nielsen (pioneer of user research) congratulated me via email.

Collaboration and Communication

If you want to be a kick-ass researcher you have to be empathetic and care about the customer and put yourself in their shoes to understand how and why they prefer to do things a certain way and then find ways to translate that into product decisions which is why it is critical to have excellent emotional intelligence, collaboration skills, and communication skills. To do this, a researcher has to collaborate with many teams (see my article on research partnerships) and communicate effectively while being mindful of the motivations of different teams/customers.

We are a communication company that uses its own product to communicate with employees and customers via messaging, video conferences and cals. For example, when we were working on defining our customer personas we had to work with Marketing, Creative, Operations, Facilities, Product and Engineering to collaborate and arrive at a shared understanding of our personas, their goals, motivations, key tasks and pain points. Collaboration is incorporating ideas from other functions to make the work you do better than if you did it alone and includes characteristics like consensus building, conflict resolution and managing expectations. Communication includes informing, clarifying, influencing, educating, documenting, and socializing. Each characteristic helps elevate the work you do. For our personas, socializing included printing and posting them on the walls of our company, documenting is explaining how we arrived at them and how they have evolved over time. Educating is having brown bag sessions and answering questions on how employees could use them.

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is defined as the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one’s emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically. Emotional intelligence (EI) helps us be more empathetic which helps us connect the dots to truly know implicit needs and motivations that drive customer behavior. For example, when understanding behavior of people video conferencing we need to understand and support the explicit and implicit needs for meetings. The obvious one is to make decisions, hear perspectives and contribute the overall goals of that project/meeting. Some implicit goals that no customer has talked about so far is how their participation varies based on who is in the meeting and how their participation changes (vs. if that person(s) isn’t present) in order to impress and get their next promotion. Features on attention awareness, task distribution, etc. could take this factor into account. People with high EI are better in tune to their strengths and weaknesses and practice self regulation of their own emotions.

Foundational skills

As you may have noticed, I haven’t mentioned excelling at user research methods or how to be great moderator or how to excel at data synthesis as that is given that you should master. As a kick-ass researcher you should also be good at updating your skills as the industry does change and learn new techniques and trends in UX research. For example, 10 years ago, UX research was focused on quantitative or qualitative research with quantitative defined as A/B tests, correlations, ANOVAs, etc. Now quantitative also extends into data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. This is one the reasons I enrolled in a 6 month bootcamp in November 2019 at UC Berkeley on Data Analytics and Visualizations.

Ultimately, how do you measure if you are a kick-ass researcher?

Research is often considered as collection, aggregation and delivering of insights about a topic but in user research it is more effective in taking those insights and translating them into product decisions and business outcomes. Some questions to ask yourself to help you measure success are:

• How many insights translated into features?
• How many papers did you publish to shed light on topics in your industry?
• How many patents did you file to shed light on the future of your industry?
• How did your insights improve awareness, activation, adoption, revenue, retention, and referrals (AAARRR metrics)?

I’ve always believed it’s a privilege to work in a job where you interact directly with customers and if you listen closely to what they say and don’t say you are going to get a few ideas on unmet needs that current products or markets don’t deliver. It helps to get some industry experience on how companies work and it would be great to take some of those ideas and start your own company whenever you are ready. I know Diane Loviglio and many others who started as UX researchers and successfully created companies.

Right industry, market, product, place and time

I fully support the theory that you should bloom where you are planted and give whatever you are doing currently your best but having been in this industry for a while not all UX research jobs are the same. Some companies take UX research more seriously than others and you want to be in those companies - where your insights influence the direction of products and where insights once presented don’t live and die in a slide deck. The industry is also important as some industries have matured faster with regards to eser experience. For example, an error in healthcare can cause a patient to die or remote work specifically in video conferencing and other forms of communications can save companies hours of productive work. Lastly, it may take a few years to be in the right place and time or get the opportunity you really want but hang in there and give it your best and in due time you will reach your goal.

Sharpening the saw

As a UX researcher you absorb a lot of the emotions and possibly challenging circumstances of life experienced by users everyday. It is a critical part of empathy and sharpening the saw. Also, in most companies researchers are few or rare compared to roles like designers or product managers and the need get a lot of research done quickly is usually the environment. Take regular breaks when needed to help you see things more clearly and help in your overall well being. Repeating one of my favorite speakers Stephen R. Covey, “we should never be too busy sawing that we forget to sharpen the saw.” So please take care of yourself as the world needs more of you, I can vouch for that!