Jason Buhle, PhD’s Post

Super interesting work!

Here is an updated list as of November 2021: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jasonbuhle_uxresearch-designresearch-userresearch-activity-6864769656205512704-Efvi

Let's be careful about assuming that investment in UX researchers = effective integration of findings into products, business models, data science applications, etc. In my experience, a number of companies have little to no idea what UX researchers are for - the UX designers just said they needed some. In these scenarios, UX researchers provide executive and middle management CYA; expendable when innovation laggard companies have two down quarters in a row.

Thanks for posting

Jason Buhle, PhD: Even though I was critical of the conclusions you draw from your data I think if you take your data up a couple of levels it is interesting and profound. Specifically, if you just ask the question; "OVERALL, how much increased focus has there been on the integration of user research in product development over the past decade regardless of skill set or education" then something profound surfaces from your data. With this question in mind "UX Research" as a job title must be a major indicator of how corporate cultures are adopting some level of concern for the user during development. In support of your finding is a search result from Google Books Ngram (link below) which shows the staggering increase in the use of the words "UX Research" over the past decade or so. The trajectory is straight-up starting in about 2004 when UX was coined as a term of art. So in my POV your data is formative and not summative, and we all know that trends indicate growth in markets which is what your data really says. CM https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=UX+Research&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2CUX%20Research%3B%2Cc0 CM

Jason Buhle, PhD this is extremely informative to those trying to mentor UXRs, people break into our industry, and or make grow within the industry. Thank you for your time and effort, and for sharing this publicly. I'm including it in my Fuel Your Curiosity newsletter! >> https://curiosity-tank.ck.page/1a8928f540

The biggest numbers of UX teams ≠ to best UXs for users. Violations of basic human factors is rampant in many of those listed.

Jason, just to add here, the companies that you have mentioned above are all product based and having a huge team implies the varied product portfolio owned by these big companies, whereas AL is just a consultant company catering to the research needs of these big companies (supoosedly AL is expected to have more number of researchers working on various different products). So I don't it is wise enough to even compare that.

The Facebook number is over 900 at this time (across the family of apps). Researchers are fully embedded on pretty much every team!

Jason! I appreciate this imperfect and more importantly interesting data. Building on this, it'd be amazing to know what the average tenure is at each company (as a proxy for experience) and to know where these researchers worked before their current job (understanding if and how talent moves between the companies). Thanks again for sharing.