Survive, revive, thrive: Pursuing a Career in User Research
My Background
I graduated in HCI with a strong inclination to user research. During my first job, the industry was going through a chaos of titles ranging from Graphics designer, Visual designer, Product designer, UI/UX designer….the list was endless. Finally when I landed my campus job they titled it as UX Specialist. And I made peace with it!
Survive -The Unicorn days
As a fresher in UX, you are mostly expected to be a unicorn. The anticipation is that you can complete the work of a 4 membered team. I was actively contributing to research facilitation, design and persuasion in product building. As a horizontal role you get work on different areas making it easier for you to recognize what keeps you going. The most rewarding part of this role is interaction with different teams increasing persuasion and participatory skills. This unicorn role gigantically boosts your decision-making skills. But you might struggle with designer tech — there would be new prototyping tools bouncing on you every day!
Learning to communicate effectively and with an impact can take you a long way.
Since I was adamant in specializing in User research, I proactively started communicating research ideas to product managers. This is easier typed here than done. Out of the 4 Projects I was supporting, one of my project managers agreed to conduct stakeholder interviews. This was my beginning!
Revive
My previous job gave me the opportunity to conduct interview cycles, creating focus groups, prototype testing, and usability testing. But it also conscripted to me work for other verticals (remember the 4 membered team?).
So finding a role and a company that would equip me to be a researcher was the next thing to do. I subsequently took a full-time position as a UX researcher at a start-up, where I conducted qualitative and quantitative research for over a year on AI-based products parallelly working with NLP and ML teams. This role enabled me to be a qualitative researcher and setting the process from defining research questions, participant recruitment, determining research methods, creating screeners and scripts, identifying required resources, setting timelines, publishing and presenting reports.
It is a rollercoaster that I was are willing to ride again and again!
Thrive
Concluding, transitioning from academic research to industry research comes with the balance of new learning along with, improvising and adapting. Even though academia gives you deep knowledge in isolated methods, learning by doing and receiving senior mentorship is the best way forward.
Since I come from a traditional knowledge foundation background in UX my journey might seem pretty straightforward, but the growth is through the micro iterations that I could make.
Hopefully there will be part 2 to this article!
Want to learn more?
If you’d like to improve your skills in User Research, then consider taking the online course User Research — Methods and Best Practices. The course certificate is recognized by industry and it will help you advance your career. Alternatively, there is an entire course on Usability Testing which includes templates you can use in your own projects. Lastly, if you want to brush up on the basics of UX and Usability, you might take the online course on User Experience. Good luck on your learning journey!
