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Discovery, Research, and Testing / Learning From Others / Workplace and Career

Five Things They Didn’t Teach Me in School About Being a User Researcher

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Graduate school taught me the basics of conducting user research, but it taught me 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

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Agile/Lean UX / Discovery, Research, and Testing

The Right Way to Do Lean Research

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StartX, a nonprofit startup accelerator, recently devoted an entire day to the role of design in early-stage companies. One panel included Laura Klein, Todd Zaki-Warfel, Christina Wodtke, and Mike Long. Each panelist had made their mark on how design is done in start-ups: Laura wrote the influential O’Reilly book on UX for Lean Startups, and Todd penned the bestselling Rosenfeld Media Prototyping book. Christina has been cross-teaching design to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship to designers at institutions such as California College

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Discovery, Research, and Testing / Learning From Others / Process and Methods / User Centered

User Experience Research at Scale

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An important part of any user experience department should be a consistent outreach effort to users both familiar and unfamiliar. Yet, it is hard to both establish and sustain a continued voice amongst the business of our schedules. Recruiting, screening, and scheduling daily or weekly one-on-one walkthroughs can be daunting for someone in a small department having more than just user research responsibilities, and the investment of time eventually outweighs the returns as both the number of participants and size

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Case Studies / Discovery, Research, and Testing / Learning From Others

Honing Your Research Skills Through Ad-hoc Contextual Inquiry

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It’s common in our field to hear that we don’t get enough time to regularly practice all the types of research available to us, and that’s often true, given tight project deadlines and limited resources. But one form of user research–contextual inquiry–can be practiced regularly just by watching people use the things around them and asking a few questions. I started thinking about this after a recent experience returning a rental car to a national brand at the Phoenix, Arizona,

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Learning From Others / Professionalism / Workplace and Career

Creating Your Personal Mission Statement

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You’re weird. In a good way, but weird nonetheless. Weird in the sense that people outside of work likely have absolutely no clue what it is you do. Maybe many at work as well. For me, this weirdness manifests itself at parties. Inevitably, a new acquaintance asks me what I do. Beads of sweat form on my forehead. My eyes dart around, desperately seeking my far more articulate wife, Mary Jean. I find her, ask her to explain me, and

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