Graduate school taught me the basics of conducting user research, but little about what it’s like working as a user researcher in the wild. I don’t blame my school for this. There’s little publicly-available career information for user researchers, in large part because companies are still experimenting with how to best make use of our talents.
That said, in the midst of companies experimenting with how to maximize user researchers, there are a few things I’ve learned specific to the role of user researcher that have held true across the diverse companies I’ve worked for. Some of these learnings were a bit of a surprise early on my my career, and I hope in sharing them I’ll save a few from making career mistakes I made in the past for lack of knowing better.
There’s a ton of variation in what user researchers do.
In my career, I’ve encountered user researchers with drastically varying roles and skillsets: many who focus solely on usability, a few who act as hybrid designers and researchers, some that are specialists in ethnography, and yet others who are experts in quantitative research. I’ve also spoken with a few who are hybrid market/user researchers, and I know of one tech company that is training user researchers to own certain product management responsibilities.
If you take a moment to write down all of the titles you’ve encountered for people who do user research work, my guess is that it will be a long one. My list includes user experience researcher, product researcher, design researcher, consumer insights analyst, qualitative researcher, quantitative researcher, usability analyst, ethnographer, data scientist, and customer experience researcher. Sometimes companies choose one title over another for specific reasons, but most of the time they’ll use a title simply because of tradition, politics, or lack of knowing the difference.
At one company I once worked for, my title was user researcher, but I was really a usability analyst, spending 80% of my time conducting rapid iterative testing and evaluation (RITE) studies. When I accepted the job at that company, I assumed–based on my title–that I’d be involved in iterative research and more strategic, exploratory work. I quickly learned that the title was misleading and should have been usability analyst.
What does this all mean for your career?
For starters, it means you should do a ton of experimentation while in school or early on in your career to understand what type of user research you enjoy and excel at most. It also means that it’s incredibly important to ask questions about the job description during an interview to make sure you’re not making faulty assumptions, based on a title, about the work you’d be doing.
#ux-design #product-design #user-research #user-experience #ux
