UX Research
Student assignment
Background: During the module “Field studies” we got to do research on product teams. We chose whether we wanted to focus on project managers, UX researchers or product designers. I chose to research the researchers.
Kuriosa: With a bachelors in social anthropology I believe myself to have a good understanding of how to collect qualitative data, which made it very fun to test in another setting than what I’ve done before.
Brief: How might we help product teams when they're trying to understand their users.
The qual & quant
For my field study I chose to research UX Researchers, to find what might help them when they're conducting research.
I did three interviews through video calls as well as a survey with 13 respondees from which I collected data.
The survey was open during one week and the interviews were conducted during a period of two days.
Hypotheses
I had three hypotheses, one of them focusing on who the UX Researcher is, one of them focusing on their target groups, and one of them focusing on their work environment.
A UX researcher considers themself to be a “People’s person”
A UX researcher might have a hard time accessing their target group (depending on who the researcher is)
A UX researcher has a need for their colleagues to better understand their work
Findings
Through my interviews and survey I found that:
UX researchers describe themselves as curious and being a people's person - but this wasn’t necessarily the top reason to why they chose to work as UX researchers.
UX Researchers use different services to access their target groups and are usually not in charge of recruiting.
UX Researchers might feel that their colleagues are not entirely understanding their needs.
Recommendations
Through my findings I would recommend the following:
A UX researcher thrive from working in an environment where they get to use their curiosity.
Involve the the UX researcher in the recruiting process by giving them access to the necessary tools used for recruiting. This will speed up the process and make it easier to test quicker and will help the researcher find the right target group as the researcher know what data they need to collect.
Share needs of the different roles in the project team internally to increase the understanding for each other and get better results.
In retrospect
Given the circumstances - this being a short student assignment - I still wanted to get as much data as possible. In retrospect it was both insightful - I learned how things are being done in the industry, but I also believe my interviews were a bit scattered. With a background in anthropology, where field work is conducted over at least a couple of months to establish relationships with your informants, I will need to take my new insights and make sense of them without losing the knowledge I have from previous experiences.