Designers transitioning into a full-time researcher role need support more than ever.

Design professionals and design Bootcamp students are clueless about the ins and outs of UX research. Some of these design professionals can hire and expand their teams, but they never consider bringing a UX researcher into their design cycle since they know very little about what they do. Often they are looked at like design practitioners that are meant for only big corporate companies and might lead to waste of cost critical resources. This article highlights some of the key decisions and things that UX researchers tend to perform but are ignored by product designers and managers. I have also tried answering many of the questions that upcoming UX-researchers have during the start of their career.

#1 What is the role of UX researchers (UXRs)?

UXRs reveals what the consumers need from the business’s products by conducting primary research, exploring consumer behavior and motivation, and working with the Product Design, Product Management, and Product Development (engineers) departments in developing new product features.

In a plain sense, UXRs do much more than just support fellow designers and improve the scenarios of business outcomes. Often, supporting designers and business outcomes are the easiest reasons why they get hired or inserted in a design team at some point or the other.

#2 What is the ground reality of the things UXRs do?

• UXRs are involved with the stakeholder management for both internal and external stakeholders. This means they might have to educate the meaning of UX on the go to everyone involved. They have to set the expectations, goals, and process forward right.
• UXRs do research. Quantitative, qualitative, evaluative, formative, competitor, and more. It is not only UXRs job to do research, but they are supposed to be masters of it. In an organization with high UX maturity, you will see UXRs even facilitating the research process across multiple teams.
• UXRs support fellow product designers in finding the answers to the hidden user-related insights. They bring empathy for the users and motivate the team to think and design user-centric experiences.

#3 What’s the difference between UXRs and UX-Designers?

A UXRs objective is to understand what a user wants. Simultaneously, a UX designer should take the customer insights uncovered by UXRs and convert them into actionable, user-centric results/mockups that resonate with the audience.

#4 What is it like to work in big tech companies?

• You will be doing work that is impactful to a big user base. This means the recognition and critique will come from all directions.
• You have to get into a habit of analyzing hundreds of reviews, interviews, and analysis reports done by people involved in the project before you came along.
• You should very comfortable talking to people of different kinds and making them feel welcoming enough to share their ideas with you.
• You will be required to present your research to internal stakeholders as presentations and publicly as visual reports.

#5 Can UXRs freelance as well?

Absolutely! Freelancing is fun because you don’t have to designate all of your work hours with the same projects. You become more of an ON-OFF UXR with no fixed timelines. Freelancing means having the flexibility to do other things during the day. However, freelancing is different from Contract because you have to then take up a project for “Y” number of weeks and dedicate 8–9 hrs per day during the project.

#6 What are some of the most common research methods?

• User Testing — Test to learn how users interact with your designs. During the test, compare your designs with the ones your competitors have. Used commonly at companies with less UX maturity.
• User Interviews — User interviews are usually generative. Meaning they are supposed to generate ideas and extract thoughts from users' minds. As a UXR, you will learn what people are expecting from the fully built product. User interviews are a qualitative research method and are generally used by organizations with more UX maturity.
• You can also combine User Testing sessions with User Interviews. There is no rule to use only one of them. As a UXR, at times, you have to play by the ear.
• Here’s a good read:

#7 What not to do when conducting a research session?

• Don’t react when a user does something wrong. Don’t try to jump in and fix it using verbal or non-verbal cues. In the real scenario, they won’t have access to your cues/reaction, and your designs are bound to fail if they couldn’t figure them out. Be a neutral party and let them struggle.
• Don’t react to the user when they do or say something right. Don’t smile or give any positive signals.
• Don’t defend your design decisions. If you cannot remove your design bias, let someone else research your designs. It’s natural to defend your own design mockups. If you don’t have access to a researcher, train a business analyst to work with you to conduct the user tests.

#8 What’s a good introduction before a user testing session?

• Invite them to sit down and then thank them for their time.
• Explain to them what they will be shown today and what they need to be doing with it.
• Let them know that they can be completely transparent and that there is no need to be diplomatic. Assure them that their responses won’t be shared with their managers if needed to be.
• Request them to speak out loud about what they are seeing and what it means to them.
• Start the test by asking some non-test related question. This is the best way to ease them into opening up.

#9 How UXRs can improve design maturity?

• UXRs can start highlighting the business side of things how design impacts or should impact business outlook. If research teams can help product designers learn about the business side of things, it will be easier to get stakeholder alignment, and hence UX maturity will go up.
• Educate about the differences between market research and user research.
• Help other UI/UX designers get comfortable conducting their own user research.
• Internal Evangelism increases UX maturity, as well. UXRs are tasked with evangelizing insights uncovered during research and promote the best research methods to do so. The whole business and design team benefits from it.
• A UXR can double down as a consultant and provide product departments with advice on usability trends, practices, and consumer experience standards. UXRs can make recommendations to align the product with design trends and practices to enhance the consumers’ experience.

#10 What are the tools one can use for UX-research?

• Here’s are some good read on uxplanet.org.