UX research, UX design, or UX writing? From the notebook of a former language teacher
When I quit a great job in language education that was never going to come around again, my stomach dropped every time I wondered if I’d look back with regret. Half choice, half not a choice, the economics of working solely to pay for my child’s daycare just seemed absurd.
Many teachers have reached out with questions about how I came to work in UX after teaching and working in academia for over a decade. Before needing a new career, I was oblivious to the world of UX and digital product development. UX designer, UX researcher, UX writer — these roles didn’t exist when I followed the winding path of my first career.
Previously, as a faculty specialist advising future language teachers, I often asked this question to help college and graduate students envision their own dream jobs:
What do you want to do every day?
In recent years, I also realized it’s important to ask another question for long-term career growth and satisfaction:
What do you want to learn about every day?
Through the lens of these questions, I spent dozens of hours researching each UX role. If you’re new to UX and reading this now, my hope is that hearing about my journey can help you in your own career discovery.
UX Research
UX researchers help teams identify and define problems, and their research can even help teams decide whether a product idea moves forward or not. Through my local UX community UXHI, I learned about the day-to-day in UX research via an informational interview with a kind and talented UX researcher (hi Sean!).
Our chat made me realize that my master’s degree training in qualitative research and experience in classroom research would translate well into many research methodologies used in UX research, such as diary studies, ethnography, and interviews. Even though UX research can be very creative and influence product direction, I realized that instead of building insights that inform decisions, I wanted to design and build the products that people interact with.
UX Design
The work of UX design seemed like a good fit, especially because of its similarities with teaching: always placing humans at the center, teachers and designers create, refine, and iterate based on feedback and data.
Perhaps because of these parallels, most teachers I’ve met through the UX of EdTech community are familiar with the UX designer role. When I began digging into job postings and checking out the portfolio websites of entry-level product designers, however, I felt discouraged. I had up to a year to retrain and find a job in my next career. Even with that gift of time, upskilling my 2D visual design chops to an industry-competitive level felt like a far stretch. So when I heard a UX writer say, “I design with words,” I was all ears.
UX Writing
Content designers use “data and evidence to give the audience what they need, at the time they need it and in a way they expect.”
— Sarah Winters, author and thought leader who coined the term “content design.” (As of 2023, “content designer” and “UX writer” often describe the same role.)
To design with words, UX writers are informed by UX and language research. The deep work of UX writing also includes understanding everything invisible affecting the visible words, such as information architecture, computing logic, and language use by competitors and around the world. Often assigned across many product areas and domains, UX writers are in a unique position to help bridge silos across teams and the product experience.
It’s all about the fit
I’ve been working with words my entire professional life. The more I learned about UX writing, the more I realized how my background prepared me for this exact role.
Many digital products are designed for global audiences. Being multilingual and having lived on three continents helps me write in English as a global language and as a source language for localization. My education in applied sociolinguistics and studying language use mean I naturally dive into language research, which is an essential part of doing UX writing well. Teaching and managing projects in education taught me how to speak to multiple audiences with the same words.
Becoming a UX writer meant that I could keep learning about how to best help people through communication, at the time they need it, on a global scale. What I had feared to be my biggest career regret, turned out to be the beginning of the career of my dreams.
Would you like to learn more about the three main individual contributor (IC) roles in UX? Here are some recommendations for getting started. For each role, you’ll find a foundational website that contains a wealth of resources, a shorter but pithy book, and an affordable or free conference where you can meet professionals in the field.
UX Writer
uxwritinglibrary.com/
Content Design
UX Writer Conference
UX Designer
baymard.com
Design for Cognitive Bias
ConFig
UX Researcher
userinterviews.com/ux-research-field-guide
Just Enough Research
UX360
As you explore these prospective new careers, try to find the overlaps between your skills, interests, values, and financial requirements. And don’t forget to ask:
What do you want to learn about every day?
Best of luck out there — stay curious!
The UX of EdTech Community’s purpose is focused on helping UX practitioners who work on products and services that support learning. We also welcome educators and those in other disciplines looking to develop a UX mindset applied in the industry of education and future of learning and work.
Subscribe to our newsletter for more UX resources supporting EdTech startups and UX practitioners.
