The EchoUser Newsletter — Winter 2024

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EchoUser Stories

8 min readJan 23, 2024

Happy New Year 🥳

Happy new year and welcome 2024. In our winter newsletter, we’ll continue our annual tradition of sharing EchoUser’s new year’s resolutions. As well, we’ll take a look back on 2023 and we’ll share some thoughts on the state of our UX profession. Lastly, be wary of hiring scams! We, unfortunately, have started to experience some of these ourselves..

Cheers!

Rally Pagulayan
CEO, EchoUser

Our 2024 resolutions 🗒️

For me, the best thing about New Year’s resolutions is not the specific improvements I’ll gain from embarking on my enlightened new goals (because I’ll be honest, I’m not the best at sticking to them), but that they’re an opportunity for a little bit of retrospection. The simple act of stopping for a minute and thinking about where I am, what I’d like to change or improve, is a good thing! We have an annual tradition here at EchoUser to articulate our resolutions for the upcoming year (we’ve been doing it since 2017), so without further ado, here are our 2024 resolutions!

Looking back on 2023 🔭

In the spirit of retrospection, I took a look at both what we wrote about in our blogs and the projects we worked on this past year.

Empathy 👁️

One of the biggest things we focused on in our blogging last year was empathy. It’s a common topic in UX and on the surface, it’s obvious why it’s an important part of our jobs. But as practitioners, we understand there’s more depth and nuance so we saw an opportunity to really dive into it. We ended up capturing our thoughts in the context of an on-going conversation about empathy between our Research Director and Senior UX Researcher in a six-part series. We touched on everything from empathy for users to ourselves.

Early career experiences 💼

As a long time UX professional, one of the most satisfying things for me is watching people on my team grow in their careers. We had both a researcher and designer complete their first years as ‘professionals’ in 2023 and they took the time to write about their experiences. I loved that both of these blogs were highly personal as well as informative. Reading these, for me, was a great reminder of what it’s like to be at that exciting early stage of your career where you’re really starting to feel like you’re getting things, but at the same time, knowing you’re going to be learning so much more. I think their writings are also a nice wayfinder for others who are just embarking into their UX careers.

Our client partner philosophy 🤝

Finally, we took some time to articulate how we approach our relationships with clients. Our success is ultimately based on making our clients happy and this series dives deeper into how we do this.

The work 🔨

2023 was not as busy as we would have liked, but we still did meaningful work throughout the year. In retrospect, I’m pretty happy to see our projects spanned a nice range of UX work — foundational research to inform product functionality, usability testing to improve products in the field, and full user-centered design projects involving research directly driving design all the way to high fidelity visual mockups.

While we can’t jump into the specifics of many of these projects, some of the highlights included:

Doing in-person usability tests for the first time in a long time. We, like most everyone else, have leaned into the efficiency and effectiveness of remote-testing. But this past Fall, we had the opportunity to conduct in-person testing, not only with the participants, but also with client stakeholders observing in person. Interacting with the participants and observers in person reminded me of some of the things you do lose when you’re fully remote. With participants, you’re able to pick up a little more on subtle interpersonal cues and, in my opinion, develop a little more rapport. On the client site, there’s much more of a shared sense of shared experience as we all got to experience the highs and lows of watching participants struggle and succeed together.

Working with different user populations than our typical ones. Our bread and butter space is enterprise tools and platforms, so the typical users we work with are highly technical users using technical tools. This past year, we had several projects that gave us the opportunity to work with users from several domains that we typically don’t get to work in. These included construction contractors, homelessness advocates, Japanophiles, and 911 operators. Getting the chance to immerse ourselves into a wide variety of domains is certainly one of the most interesting and rewarding things we get to do.

Complete user centered design for complex systems. This is definitely our favorite kind of project, a complicated space that requires deep user research to drive a truly user centered design solution. We began a large project in the communications systems space this past year with a mandate to completely envision a new solution. We’re actually continuing our work here and we’re excited to share what we’re working on, which we will do in due time.

The bigger picture with UX 🏔️

2023 was a challenging year for UX professionals, especially those of us practicing in tech. Tech had a pretty tough year with widespread layoffs and UX people were certainly not exempt. An unfortunate byproduct of the job losses has been a developing narrative that the UX profession is losing its perceived value. I think the narrative is false and is primarily an emotional (but understandable) reaction to so many people experiencing the impacts of a significant economic slowdown for the first time in their careers. Those of us who’ve been around multiple decades have seen this before. It’s not fun, but we know what it looks like and that things will, eventually, bounce back) UX is not done, not by a longshot, because it brings real value to the table. That being said, the adversity has generated some valuable conversation around where the UX profession needs to improve.

UX Research is evolving? 📈

UX research, in particular, has had a lot of chatter around its inability to effectively communicate its value to company leaders. The general theme is that UX research needs to better connect itself to the overall business strategy. I thought these two articles were pretty thoughtful commentary on that theme:

The UX Reckoning is Here, by Judd Antin
The Waves of UX Research, by Dave Hora

I like that both of these authors are practitioners who have been in the field for several years so they bring a perspective built on some actual depth of experience. They provide some interesting context around where the UX research field has been which gives a little more credence to their thoughts on how the field might need to evolve. They’re worth a read!

UX is just fine 🌞

If you want to feel a little better about the state of the UX field today and where it’s probably going, take a look at Jakob Nielsen’s article, UX Angst of 2023. Nielsen is able to temper a lot of today’s angst in the context of his 40 years of practice.

My own perspective? Well, I’ve been around long enough to never really trust predictions, especially my own. But I do believe strongly that the UX profession will be fine because its value is evergreen. During my career, I’ve seen the names, tools, and technology change. But the underlying methodology and the information it delivers has not. Ultimately, the UX profession believes that the best path to product success is by deeply understanding the problems that people have and then creating solutions that best solve those problems. There will always be a demand for people who can do this well. The larger economy will ebb and flow and at the moment, we’re in a challenging time. But we are providing real value and when times are tougher, it’s that much more important to make it obvious that we’re providing value.

Job offer scams 👿

Unfortunately, it looks like I’ll be closing this newsletter with a warning. We recently posted a couple of job openings (for a Senior UX Researcher and a UX Designer — check out indeed.com to see if they’re still open) and we’ve been dismayed to see that there’s a new (to us) scam around hiring. A recruiter claiming to be associated with our company reaches out to prospective candidates via email using the content of our job posting and asks the candidate to apply by filling out a questionnaire. If the candidate responds, the so-called recruiter will respond with an “official” job offer. There is no job offer and the recruiter is fake. I’d seen references to this type of scam but this is the first time it’s happened to us and it’s happening to quite a few people.

Please be very skeptical that you could receive a full job offer without actually talking to a person. Thankfully, some of the people who have been subject to this scam reached out to us to confirm what was going on and we were able to let them know it was all fake.

As for EchoUser, if we are considering you as a candidate, we will reach out to you to set up an actual phone call (or video call) first. Then, if you move on to the next phase, we will do a more formal interview cycle where you will interact with several members of our team over video (or in person if you’re local). Also, we don’t employ recruiters so any recruiter claiming to be an EchoUser employee or associate is lying.

If you’re job searching, we sincerely wish you the best of luck and hope that you don’t experience this kind of thing.

More about us

Learn more about us at echouser.com including our past work and our blog. Want to contact us? Email us at hello@echouser.com.

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