Navigating Your Way into User Research (UXR)

I’ve had the tremendous fortune to spend time over the last year mentoring some of the best and brightest talent aspiring to break into the field of user research (also known and referred to here as “UXR”). This post is dedicated to those 35+ people (and counting!) and others like them who may be beyond my immediate reach. Through those conversations I’ve noticed a few themes and common questions that I would like to share my observation and experience about to encourage the journey into user research. I hope this post serves as a useful guide and a source of inspiration. I have certainly been inspired by all of the conversations I’ve had and have been constantly reminded “why I do this” during this past year.

Know your “Why?” 

One of the first questions I ask in every mentoring call is why the person thinks they want to be a user researcher. The profession has become more visible and popular in recent years, but I worry sometimes that people see UXR as an “easy” career to break into when it’s really not. User research has its own practice and craft, so being clear why UXR is something you want to do helps create clarity in the conversations you will have with recruiters, hiring managers, and other UXRs you meet along the way. For some, it’s about wanting to contribute to building interesting or important new products and services. For those who have prior work experience, it could be the realization that there are other ways to focus on the people using experiences in the world and the importance of centering those users to build a great experience; create impact on decisions and choices about those experiences; or ways to leverage prior experience but in new opportunity spaces. As a person who pivoted to the field myself, these questions are especially near and dear to my heart. 

Have you done your research? 

This is meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek, but the field of user research involves more than the technical ability to do research. You don’t necessarily need to know everything in great detail, but having a sense of how user research emerged and where it’s going is incredibly helpful. This includes: what fields it’s influenced by (such as design, product development, HCI/human factors, cognitive and behavioral psychology); the various roles it can play in different industries or organizations (ie, service vs strategic); how it complements but is differentiated from other insights functions (market research, customer experience, analytics); what are the big thematic questions of the day (most recently this includes areas like privacy, trust, ethics, equity, and accessibility); and so on. 

There are some great resources available to do cursory research on the discipline and on the role of research in the product and design process ahead of submitting applications and starting interviews. A few others worth recommending that are not on this list include posts from dScout’s People Nerds and several podcasts: Technically Speaking podcast hosted by LinkedIn Design colleague Harrison Wheeler, Tech Wrap Queen hosted by LinkedIn UXR colleague Renee Reid, and Design Better from InVision.  

Perhaps especially true in the research field, it is imperative to do some research!  Follow your curiosity if you decide to go deeper. In a recent conversation, I talked to someone who studied linguistics about how she might connect her prior education interests with innovation areas such as voice design; for someone else with an education background, how they might connect that expertise to learning and development product spaces. 

Put on the hat of a recruiter or a hiring manager

In my day job, I have the privilege of leading the user research teams working on our job seeking and hiring products at LinkedIn. While I’ve certainly been a jobseeker and know quite a few people who have, it’s been illuminating to have the opportunity to better understand how recruiters and hiring managers assess candidates especially at early stages. I like to think about the application as a push mechanism - you are pushing yourself into the recruiter/hiring manager’s consideration set. However, many people use LinkedIn as a “pull” mechanism to create a talent pool of potential candidates. So in thinking about your resume or profile, language matters. 

In my own initial attempt to pivot into UXR, I didn’t do my homework well enough and had an awkward interview in which someone tested my knowledge about “A/B testing” protocols. I got extremely flustered and it showed. My research background was in education policy research and market research, and I had experience with corollaries to A/B tests, but they went by different terms in those fields. Needless to say, I knew I got the answer “wrong” from the way the interviewer responded to me, and was passed over for the role. 

One of the most fundamental things I like to do in mentor calls is to talk about how someone might reframe or rephrase language in their resume or profile into UX terminology. I think of this as helping to translate what you know into a language the other person understands, just like if you were traveling abroad and needed some common words and phrases to facilitate basic communication. 

A fairly easy way to do this is to review the job description and make sure your resume and profile reflects that language back to the recruiter/hiring manager. Please make sure you know what those words mean and use them authentically to your experience! For instance, this is where you may have experience doing ethnographic research or with “in situ” methods, but the job post refers to needing an understanding of “foundational/discovery/generative methods.” Oftentimes, the language used in a job description is then also used in keyword searches or filtering, so make sure you know how that team or company talks about the work, so you can give yourself the best chance to land in the pool for consideration! 

Another tip is to look at the profiles of other UXRs and get a sense of how people showcase themselves and their work. Is common language being used? Are there ways to showcase your strengths and accomplishments that you haven’t considered? Don’t plagiarize someone else’s words, but profiles can serve as an inspiration to think about how you can best showcase your experience and potential. 

Tell a compelling story

User researchers are influencers and storytellers. We don’t create flows or align pixels, write code, or draft business plans or product requirements, but our work is critically important to all of the strategic and tactical decisions along the R&D journey. As you share your work with recruiters, hiring managers, stakeholders, and other UXRs consider if your story follows a clear arc. Most interview processes will require you to share a case study or portfolio example. This is a great opportunity to demonstrate your storytelling ability! Consider proactively addressing questions like: 

Problem framing: 

• Did your partners or the business pose a question or problem? If so, share how that question was framed to you. It is not uncommon for our stakeholders to pose questions in terms of driving metrics (indicators of success like growth, revenue, engagement) rather than in terms of a user need. 
• How did you reframe that question to center the user? What was the research plan you built around that new question?

Technical know-how: 

• What methods did you choose to use to answer the questions? Why those and not others? 
• Who did you choose to include in your research? Were any key user populations excluded? Why? 

Collaboration/How you like to work: 

• How were your partners or stakeholders involved in the research? What role did they play with you? 

Outcomes & Impact: 

• What did you learn? (I don’t mean literally sharing trade secrets but the “so what” of all research projects that can be conveyed to an interviewer, for instance.)
• What impact did your research have on decisions or outcomes?

Self Reflection/Learner’s mindset: 

• Reflecting on the project, what did you learn as a researcher? 
• What would you do differently after this experience? 

Showcase your unique point of view

One of UXR’s strengths as a discipline is the varied and many paths people bring into the field. Adding unique and diverse perspectives and experiences simply makes the work better. The field needs a multidisciplinary lens to meaningfully inform decisions and spur innovation. In my team at LinkedIn, we have user researchers with very diverse backgrounds such as: psychology, sociology, anthropology, HCI, design, architecture, art history, marketing, etc. Your prior areas of study or passion can bring a new lens to a product or team you work with. What a gift! Be proud of that expertise and think about how it can help build a better product or new, novel ways to understand the audiences that can be served.

Particularly for people who have prior career experience, hoping to pivot into UXR, I see many people downplaying that experience as a potential strength in the UXR field. While our paths may wind around, all work experience is meaningful and important to shaping the professional you’ve become. Don’t undervalue how those past experiences inform your perspective as a researcher. One suggestion is to seek out people who are in industry now but studied the same field as you, and ask them for tips and pointers specific to leveraging your expertise in the UX field. Being able to speak to this with confidence can contribute to the passion, presence, and POV that you offer. 

Call to Experienced UXRs

Finally, if you are an experienced researcher or research leader still reading this, I encourage you to spend time paying it forward to those who aspire to do this work as well. I’d also love to hear your “why UXR” in the comments below! 

Special thanks to Tejas Peesapati and UX Coffee Hours for creating a space to offer my service to so many bright stars! Additional thanks to my colleagues Sarah Aquino, Nicole Lee, and Kevin Newton as well as my husband Nick Ohochinsky for their feedback on this post.