I’m Kerem. I’ve started to build my researcher identity in my undergraduate education, in psychology. While I was a student, I shifted my interest and time to study on user experience research.

In order to be able to do user research, you have to know the fundamentals of doing research and experimental research methodologies, luckily, I learned in my undergraduate years. The contribution of having a social science background to research is undeniable. At those times, I had not yet explored the field of UX Research and did not know the term “UX”, but had same mindset. I am now applying the vast majority of the methods and processes I learned to the whole experimental processes I am in.

Contribution of psychology education to service design processes

In service design process, when we understand the behavioral motivations of people at every point where they use a product / service and transform what we have obtained into meaningful outputs, we can actually observe the position that psychology has acquired in a research process. Whenwe approach people not only as a customer like in any shop, or just like a type of machine or numerical data, but also by understanding their feelings and thoughts and the motivations behind their behavior, and develop the product / service in this way, we create much more efficient and usable systems. By doing that, the product / design / service that interacts with the end user is not only planned according to the boss’ decision and business model; thanks to impact of user research, it turns into an asset that provides maximum value for its user.

Since the courses I took at school and the degree I received, our main theme is to reveal the cause and effect relationship of human behavior and to understand the underlying motivation and processes, these lessons have prepared a great base for us from different perspectives.

I can say that the clinical psychology courses I took and the educational atmosphere I was constantly in made being in research process simple for me in creating personas and analyzing the personalities.

For instance, 1:1 user interviews are just like a psychotherapy session, without directing the person, just getting the existing information and processing it. It is very important to ask the right questions properly and having an ability to moderate that session. Even if we don’t always understand people’s behaviors in patterns, being able to understand the motivational reasons behind most behaviors and make predictions helps me a lot on the way to the conclusion of the research.

What cognitive processes does a person go through when interacting with the design and the product? How are people’s attention spans and their approach to variables around? What is the effect of our memory on using products? We see, we read, but how do we perceive them? In recent years, when the importance and position of human-computer interaction has increased, examining cognitive processes also increase the importance of understanding human physiological and bodily behaviors and thought patterns, and progressing in line with the results.

Each individual acts with different motivations. A clear understanding of this motivation is also very important for us in terms of the functionality and usability of a product / service. Individuals’ in-group and out-group behaviors may differ, and it is possible to produce products suitable for the relevant social structure when we can see these results.

The ability to understand the difference between what is written in books and what happens in real life is really important when we have a chance to have one-on-one interviews with people, collect data in a lab or field, and then we have a chance to apply what we have learned.

Interdisciplinary communication

Service design is a field that gathers people from various disciplines and from different perspectives to work collaboratively. The user researcher should be able to understand not only the users but also the team members and should know which team member stated their problem in which way. There may be group assignments in every undergraduate department, but number of assignments are quite high in psychology. It is an undeniable fact that the struggling with diverse thoughts around people and having developed some skills to deal with people and handle situations in these groups adds such value to the psychologist. Because in business life, you may not always be able to work with people you get along well with. It is very important that your skills such as problem solving, crisis management, time management within teams have developed at some point. During our education, we had to learn “how to” and gained some skills enough to jump into the field, almost.

While finishing…

Yes, we do service design and everything we are doing is for human. In order to obtain design ideas throughout the process, the best analysis of the insights gathered from the users with appropriate research methods and testing the applicability of the data ensures healthy results for the product or service.

Being involved in the intersection of social sciences, psychology, technology and design is so much fun for me and at the same time beneficial for the results we have achieved.

I hope that the value that being based on social sciences, in other words, being trained as a researcher, adds to the field of user experience will be more noticeable by everyone, everywhere.

You can drop a message to me anytime. Please do not hesitate to say hi!

Kerem Can Demirtaş — LinkedIn, E-mail: [email protected]