Resources for starting well as a UX researcher
Tricks and tips that I have learned the hard way during the past 6 months at a digital product company
Introduction
As a UX researcher I support product decisions and improve cross-platform user experience based on user insights.
Let me introduce a few recommendations for starting well as a first UX researcher at your place, build on my experiences and inspired by Leah Buley’s book.
Map the organisation
First of all map the territory. In other words do organisational research, draw a stakeholder map. You will probably make it for yourself, for internal usage only. Use service design techniques.
Learn company culture — ask for senior professionals to allow you to follow them as a fly on the wall to meetings and learn how to speak with others. Don’t forget to make notes, and tell them you are going to make notes for yourself.
Attend company gatherings and do networking. Join for lunch or breakfast with other teams, listen to their stories, projects.
Communication
Ask as many questions as you can, to improve the speed of your learning curve. Learn which professional question should be addressed to whom.
Use plain language at the initial period — you don’t want to offend your new colleagues. People may feel odd when they don’t understand your terminology.
Express your thoughts with sketches, people might find easier to understand them than your way of thinking.
Collaboration with others
Seek allies within the organisation — product managers, designers, marketers, analysts, front-end professionals may speak your language. Especially seek the ones who worked with UX professionals before. They are probably more familiar with your work methodology you follow. Arrange a meeting or a casual dinner and talk with them about their professional pain points, gains, goals and stories.
Think ahead and support collaboration with entry level UX professionals within your organisation. There will be enormous amounts of work, and you would be grateful for their help. See the possibilities that they can fullfil.
UX evangelisation
Look for the “voice of the customer” — visit sales and support, introduce yourself, your position, and why are you there. Also, collect as much in-house insight about customer problems as possible. All that to kick-off your first project. Ask for shadowing possibilities at the support or sales department.
Seek for previous professionals, product managers, UX researchers who left the company and ask for information about the production processes, the methods they used, the projects they finished, what worked, what failed, and why. Meet them over a coffee and listen to their stories.
Be a humble teacher: you are introducing a new way of thinking, part of a whole production methodology to follow. Encourage UX enthusiasts within your organisation: recommend them books, courses, meetups, articles via Slack or in-person. Share interesting professional stories, conferences or tips & tricks. Hold a lightning talk about your work and your experiences.
Speak about your goals and what do you want to achieve both on a professional and organisational level. Be careful not to disrupt the plans of others within the company.
Cross-functional project work
Within your cross-functional project team, share your work early and share it often. Let others know what you are working on, what problems you are faced with. During stand-up meetings the team can inform the other about their current work. Involve your team members in researching activities and insight clustering, these are the easiest way to share knowledge within your team. Find more details on affinity digramming here.
Urge for setting up metrics 📊 for the most important funnels, to pair quantitative findings with your qualitative ones and track ROI of your projects.
Do project management, and make estimations of your work. E.g. do a heuristic evaluation on a product, log your time ⏱, and next time you can inform your team how much time do you need to finish a task. Dedicate different workdays for meetings, research, design, documentation.
Meetings and stakeholder communication
Prepare for stakeholder meetings: create different scenarios and play around with them before the meetings.
Easily digestible reports
Make your report easily digestible for your colleagues and stakeholders at meetings — experiment what works for whom.
- Short reports on slides for C-level executives and managers.
- Screenshots with a verbatim user quote describing the situation for developers, managers, marketers and your project team members.
- Sketches on paper, in Axure or InVision for your project team members.
- Videos for anyone who doesn’t respond well to the ones above.
Always have the whole research report about your process at hand to dig into details when needed.
Base your work on evidence: use data sheets, surveys, user interviews, usability tests, secondary research, and refer back to them. People are more likely to follow your suggestions if it’s backed up by evidence.
Help others to empathize with users
While redesigning the onboarding flow I used verbatim quotes and screenshots to back up my suggestions. I noticed these are sometimes not enough to influence my team members. First I played short time-lapse videos 🎥 on users facing usability issues during tests. Later I invited them to attend usability test sessions as observers. This helped them to empathize with users and agree to re-design a part of the onboarding flow.
Embrace the days when you can go on with your research or design work. But I’m pretty sure that soon you are going to be a black belt level communicator 🥋.
Professional growth
Since there is no senior professional within your organisation who can review your work, listen to your previous interviews, and make notes on what to improve. Ask for feedback on reports, designs or sketches to see how it would be more digestible for others.
From now on, you have to take care of your own professional development:
- Read as many books as you can. Start with Leah Buley The User Experience Team of One, Erika Hall Just Enough Research, Dave Gray Liminal Thinking, Tom Greever: Articulating Design Decisions, Kim Goodwin: Designing for the digital age.
- Read articles on Medium, NNG, and different online magazines.
- Visit local professional meetups, and ask as much questions as you can from senior level UX professionals.
- Seek for a mentor if possible. If you are a junior level, a mid-level might help you. If you are a mid-level professional, a senior-level might help you.
- Join to global professional communities on social media or Slack, and ask your professional questions there too.
- Back to the schools again: attend workshops, courses, design school, and do research to grow professionally.
Key takeaways
Don’t be afraid to fail! You might feel stressed or confused, but don’t worry, this is the process of professional growth 🚀.
Consider this as an experiment: if one aspect doesn’t work — move on to the other one and follow that one.
Good luck! 🍀
Thanks for reading my article, any feedback is greatly appreciated! I’m happy to hear about your experiences.
Special thanks to
My beloved sister Agnes Vasarhelyi (iOS developer) for being an inspiration and never letting me down.
My friends Bence Bohati and Balázs Kétyi (product designers). My teacher Csilla Herendy @herendycs (UX researcher) and Raffaele Boiano @rainwiz (UX designer) for helping me to grow professionally. And my family 👨👩👦 for all the love ❤️ and support.
