Absolute Beginners

Today marks the first day of my ‘official’ freelance career. When I say ‘official’, I mean, it is now my main source of income, a scary prospect indeed.

The reason for my post is merely a therapeutic one. 

Following eleven years working in an agency, I have the task today of writing an accurate description for prospective clients; describing myself and what I can offer to their projects. I have to admit, I have found it difficult to succinctly explain how I have come to be a UX Researcher and how my career progression makes sense, given my training and background are in a different area completely.

I have a theory of how I came to be in this predicament, and am curious as to how many other digital professionals find themselves in this dilemma also.

I suspect that the main reasoning is because the digital landscape is an ever changing one. Unlike other sectors, people don’t just choose a job role, aspire to become it, and then spend the rest of their careers in that particular silo.

It is my personal experience, that a person begins working in an area, gains exposure to different work on various projects, achieves specialist knowledge and skillsets, and eventually (if they are lucky) it all makes sense at the end. I have been lucky.

I have never felt worthy of being labelled ‘a creative’, or even ‘part of the creative team’, during my time working in web analysis, and SEO, I always felt far more akin to the tech and development teams. My job depended on data; decisions were made on the results of that data, and I looked at how users interacted with the applications we produced via user statistics. However, I once went to an event where the speaker talked about ‘everybody is creative’, and that really creativity is just curiosity. Curious is definitely a more accurate portrayal of how I see myself and my role.

Throughout my career, I always felt like I was discovering new roles that people held within our (then) emerging industry. One of my personal favourites was ‘happiness manager’, which even now seems a bit of an oxymoron. Can you ‘manage’ happiness?

I digress….

It was approximately four years ago, I began working with a UX Designer, and I discovered that my job had an official name. All of the ‘bits’ that I performed on a project, were in fact an official job role. This was a revelation. The research, web analysis, stakeholder interviews, user profiling, competitor analysis and contextual analysis tasks i had been fulfilling, were all part of a UX Researcher’s role. I had been performing these roles as part of my web analysis role and as a result of my skillset from my SEO project days.

Once I had discovered the ‘proper’ job role title, I was confident expanding my work into user testing, and gaining more experience. Although I had an active role previously, I never felt it was my ‘place’, and confused user testing, with user acceptance testing (like many agencies still do).

Because of this experience, I feel strongly that a person's skillset means much more on a project, than the particular title.

I have worked on large scale digital applications and systems as a UX Researcher at JP74 for the past four years, even though I was doing this for a lot longer unknowingly.

I still feel like my changing career needs explanation, so for those interested here it is:

I trained as a journalist. My degree was in Journalism, and I began working for local publications. The skills required for this role were; research, people skills, objectivity, writing, storytelling, attention to detail, interviewing technique and ultimately the analysis of human behaviour.

It was these skills that afforded me the graduate role of Online Marketing Exec at Th_nk, the role for search engine optimisation (SEO) included research, and lots of writing. During this role, I learned more about how ‘digital’ was structured, the teams involved in projects, dynamics of an agency and how a project progresses through production. I also learned the more technical aspects of search engines and websites.

The reporting process for SEO, required an analysis of the effectiveness of the activities being undertaken. Not how high a site ranked, but what impact on the site traffic this had. Nobody pays for SEO to just reach a higher ranking in the results, they do it for more visitors, better quality visitors and of course, conversions. This is where my skills in web analysis developed. I quickly learned that through the interpretation of data I could identify ‘blockers’ on a site. I could look at user journeys, drop out points and funnels to see what could be negatively (or positively) affecting the sites performance. After all, more visitors doesn't mean a better performing site.

I moved agencies, and became much more involved in a project's progression through an agency. I sat on the planning team, and worked closely between tech and design. I was the bridge, I took on tasks that didn’t seem to have ‘a place’ alongside the web analysis and research roles I performed on projects. I project managed aspects of the project, in particular pre project phase. Retrospectively, I was playing the role of UX Researcher, packaging up knowledge for the design team to be able to consider the user throughout their designs.

The role of the UX Researcher uses skills such as research, interviewing, data interpretation, analysis of human behaviour, storytelling and an good understanding of agency production, all of which I had gained during my time in previous roles. There has been a stark crossovers in skills required, from four very different job roles that wouldn’t usually be considered to be even remotely similar.

So to repeat my earlier statement, what is in a job title? Skillset is far more important.

So as a great man once said ‘With eyes completely open, but nervous all the same’, I will pursue my freelance career but first…. the description.

(Quote is from David Bowie, Absolute Beginners)

Website coming soon. To find out more about me and what I can offer please message me. Thank you.