As a UX researcher, it’s easy to assume that your primary responsibility is to gather insights and data that will inform the design and development of products and services. But there’s another critical skill that goes unnoticed: playing politics. This involves understanding the power dynamics within your organization and using that knowledge to navigate your […]
I’ve noticed a recent uptick in interest in two provocative articles about user research: (1) First Rule of Usability? Don’t Listen to Users and (2) Walmart’s $1.85 Billion Dollar Mistake. In my view, both of these are being used to advocate for exactly the wrong things. User research involves studying how people interact with products, […]
As a UX researcher, you have the skills and expertise to help businesses improve their user experience and create products that users love. However, it’s important to know how to sell yourself effectively in order to land freelance work or a job in the field. Here are some tips to help you sell yourself as […]
User experience (UX) research (UXR) is a process of gathering and analyzing information about customers’ experiences with products and services. The goal of UX research is to improve the usability and overall customer experience with products and services. There are a variety of ways to conduct UX research, but the most common methods include: interviews, […]
I’m leaping into the fray and offering UX research job interview preparation via fiverr. Interview preparation helped me land my first PM role at a fast-paced startup. It helped me get my first industry UX research job at a mid-size tech company, and it propelled me through *two* FAANG interview loops at Meta and Amazon. […]
I recently started Stanford Online’s PM course, and one of the first pre-readings assigned was a blog post by Ben Horowitz, Good PM / Bad PM. It’s an old post, but you can find several more recent attempts (not by Ben Horowitz) that riff on the same core ideas. There are a few ideas I […]
tl;dr know which participants you need to conduct research that generates value and design screeners to ensure that you get them. We recently finished a round of interviews designed to put ourselves in a position to explain how experienced middle school teachers select literary texts to use in their ELA curricula. We recruited people through […]
tl;dr If you’re not reflecting on your product practices, then you’re going to have a hard time improving them. Today I reflect some more on communication. When you’re the communicator, you have the power to establish a clear frame of reference for your audience in order to minimize the possibility of misunderstanding, accurately convey research […]
Many product development problems are complex or [shudder] wicked. They’re more intricate than they may seem, they change over time, and they involve humans. It may seem paradoxical, then, to say that a significant contributing factor to product dev problems is simple to express: communication is the problem someone somewhere A lot of the problems […]
tl;dr If you need research participants, you’re on a tight deadline to collect data, and you’ve exhausted your personal network(s), including current users of your product, then here are two suggestions that produced decent results for me: (1) get stakeholder buy in so that you can offer good incentives and (2) expand your participant pool […]
design inquiry 