I’m a UXR, a user experience researcher.
My work includes Google, Facebook, Amazon, HP, Apple, Twitter, FedEx, GE, and many many other top companies. I get to geek out on the best new tech, software, tools, products, and solutions invented by the best brands.
I love this craft!
I have 35 years experience in UX, as an independent freelancer, as embedded in major corporations, as principal at a world-class agency. I participated in the birth of web UX in the early 90s and the birth of mobile UX in the early 00s. And I’m still here, witnessing the birth of AI UX.
Recently, this field has exploded —
— on the demand side, driven by Covid and the need to go contactless, and on the supply side, by the Great Resignation and thousands of professionals shifting careers.
Lately, I’ve been helping aspiring UXRs ‘break into’ the profession. I’ve made a few key discoveries about their efforts — both successes and struggles. And I’ve learned that what they’re missing is not about research.
I’m an entrepreneur at heart. All my UX experience has been in service of the business and the customer, and all the UX work I’ve done over 3+ decades has been focused on business results. This is a natural, automatic mindset for me.
Research must serve the business and the customer.
Research methods, science, tools, lingo, and technical chops are secondary.
I searched the available content on ‘how to break into UX research’ and I found scant little mention, much less substantial guidance, on the business mindset.
The business mindset for a UXR includes three ways of thinking about ‘research’, about ‘experience’, about ‘users’:
- Make the Business Mindset Shift: What is business? What is the role of ‘experience’ in business? Who are ‘users’ in a business context?
- Be an Entrepreneur: Aspiring UXRs do best who step up, innovate, and find opportunities to make things happen — before that first official UX job.
- Become a Marketer: New UXRs succeed who package themselves, position themselves, and craft their contribution and their message as more than a ‘researcher’.
Developing a UX Business Mindset — why it matters and why every aspiring UXR must adopt it
The business mindset for UX starts with one essential truth: All outcomes in business occur ONLY as choices made by individual customers in the experiences we provide them.
Read that again. It entirely redefines the role of ‘experience.’
All business outcomes can only happen within experiences.
Business is about the exchange of value and benefits that solve a problem or fulfill a need or a desire, for fair compensation. Pure and simple. All of that happens within experiences that communicate and demonstrate the value, that mediate the exchange of compensation, and that ultimately deliver the value or fulfill the desire.
Your role is to influence the business.
Your primary value as UXR is NOT research. Like everyone else in the business, your job is to make the business successful by making customers successful.
I learned UX in marketing and business management. I practiced it in startups and ventures, with relentless attention to customer focus, and I learned UX under immense pressure to deliver business results. I have no formal UX training.
Hiring managers always think about the business. We don’t only look at skills and letters after your name and ‘credentials’, we ask you to demonstrate you can do the job. And the job is a business job.
You have to think like a business person, because that’s who you’ll work for and that’s who you’ll serve and that’s who will hire you — or not.
This is a stretch for aspiring UXRs.
Researchers can be introverted, intellectual, and tend to over-analyze, and it’s challenging to step out, take the initiative, to be a marketer and promote yourself. But mastering these skills for the move into UX are the same skills you’ll need to succeed in UX. That’s what hiring managers look for.
In business, to survive, we go find opportunities to serve. We make things happen for customers by creating powerful, effective experiences for them in the real world. Adopt that mindset in your job search.
Make that your UXR persona.
Aspiring UXRs and the UX Entrepreneur Mindset: make things happen, solve problems, step up — exactly where you are right now
I asked a number of highly successful, practicing UXRs about their big UX break.
The ways they got into the field was not by fixing their resume, or creating an excellent portfolio, or putting another degree after their names.
While those helped, they were necessary but not sufficient.
The key is acting like a UX entrepreneur.
I talked to some of the most talented, successful UXRs in the country. Their stories were consistent: They got their break by critically, creatively looking at the organizations, operations, and businesses they were currently working for and embedded in and tackling UX needs right in front of them.
- They learned the UX tools and skills to do basic UX research and mastering the experiences available to them.
- They used that to figure out how to make life better for their clients, customers, and users.
- They then used those business outcomes, those successes, as the primary narrative to get their first or next UXR gig. And the next one.
Don’t take another UX course before you take a business course.
Don’t network with other UXRs before you go talk to a few struggling entrepreneurs. Don’t look for more academics to discuss the next skill you need, until you go find an enterprise e-commerce manager or marketing manager struggling to increase conversion rates.
Adopt that entrepreneurial spirit and make something happen where you are now. Stop looking for companies to give you internships and training, because in most cases, that’s not their mission.
Their mission is to serve customers.
The ‘commercial’ UX Research field is focused on serving the businesses and clients, not on training you.
Don’t get stuck on ‘how do I get experience if no one will give me experience?’ In the business world, not much is given to you for free. This is true in any field.
Go create the experience — because ‘experience’ is your trade, right?
Aspiring UXRs and the Marketer Mindset: how to package and position yourself — that’s what marketers do
The job you are applying for is not research.
The job is to create better outcomes for the business, and the best way to do that is to create better experiences for the customer.
All marketing is about creating experiences.
As a UXR, your greatest value is creating a compelling, well-orchestrated experience for your colleagues, the decision makers, of the customers’ experience. Your success as a researcher will be defined by how successful you are in creating this ‘experience-experience.’
For the job search,“positioning” and “messaging” yourself are essential. That means all three of these principles and practices apply to your job search:
- Business Mindset: Who is this business serving? What are their products and services? What experiences must they create to help their customer succeed?
- Entrepreneur: In this job, who are you going to serve? How and why you are a better solution? That’s a basic business consideration! Don’t focus much on yourself. As much as you floss your resume and portfolio, go research this company from a business mindset.
- Marketer: The job market is a marketplace, and this is a competition — you’re competing with hundreds (thousands?) of other people. Taking this business perspective is a competitive advantage.
Here’s a marketing plan:
- Find UX research courses or training to learn the basics. Go to YouTube and watch UX topics that interest you and show you the basics. Read UX books, blogs, and look for UX conferences. Medium has many excellent UX channels.
- Work on adopting the mindset (as I’ve shared in this article) on the UXR Business Mindset, UXR Entrepreneurial Mindset, and UXR Marketing Mindset.
- Now go find business courses, YouTube videos, books, blogs, conferences, and other ways to immerse yourself in the business mindset. Go talk to business people, entrepreneurs, and decision makers.
- Then, start applying all that to pro bono and volunteer projects. Do basic UX studies in your current job, and with any organizations you belong to as a professional or as personal interests. Gradually take on more challenging projects, paid or not, and build up your skill. Be relentless! Have faith!
A business case for aspiring UXRs: How we drove growth in the Great Recession through initiative, inventiveness, grit, perseverance, influence, and an attitude of adventure
It’s 2008. The wave of the Great Recession is breaking all over the world.
I work for a large financial services and products company that’s in serious decline, and we have to find ways to grow revenue and save money.
So I introduce everyone to this thing called usability testing.
There is nothing at all sexy about this kind of UX research.
It is the most basic, task-oriented, show-leadership-how-dismal-the-website-is usability study. I scrounge two empty rooms and some old abandoned equipment to MacGyver a test lab. We invite participants from the surrounding neighborhood.
The focus and emphasis is on revenue.
As the staggering economic decline is bringing many businesses to their knees or shutting them down, we wonder: can we actually grow bottom-line financial results with no initial testing budget and a market in decline?
We can. We did.
We made web site improvements, which drove revenue growth, then improved email programs to grow it more, then moved to the call center to do usability with phone reps and customers — which drove efficiencies and cost savings. At each stage, we re-invested part of the wins for the next tests.
We managed to drive $3.2M to the bottom line.
From a research perspective, it was all simple, direct, cheap, fast-turnaround, and didn’t use any innovative methods or expensive tools.
Throughout, the focus was the business.
Throughout, the focus was creating better experiences for customers. The research was a means to that end. What people remember is the $3.2M.
Not the research.
All outcomes in business happen only through the experiences we create.
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I’m Bob Berry — researcher, speaker, writer, and innovator on the art of compelling experience.bob@itstheusers.com / LinkedIn / http://ItsTheUsers.com
