How to Prepare for a Top-Tier UX Research Interview

“Successful UX Research Interviews” was an expert panel with Nicole Bacchus of Meta, Elsa Ho of DoorDash, Dalia El-Shimy of Miro, and Jane Davis of Zoom, hosted in the UX Strategy community (https://bit.ly/3sfg9DQ). This article is a summary of the panel written by our community’s own Kaouther Taam and Tisha Woods. The challenge question for the panel was “What are the skills and capabilities that UX researchers must have to successfully apply for entry level, mid-career and expert UXR roles?” You can view a video playback of the panel by joining the community using the link above, and clicking the video link in the #general channel.

*What are some expectations about skills and experience?*Entry-level:*

• Background: candidates from all backgrounds, with a general level of interest and engagement in user research. no professional experience is expected; familiar with the field and understand the basics of UXR (and how it differs from market research); a unique way of thinking and analyzing information; if you can do the job, you can do the job; YOE doesn’t matter; can you demonstrate proficiency? okay to not be good at all different methods; focus on someone who is good at one method and focus on execution
• good opportunity for transitioners to add a new skill to the team (can be entry level for shorter period of time) - video production for researchers, customer support with a deep knowledge of the product and how to talk to people about challenges; add new skills and teach something new
• Portfolio: school projects and side projects are valuable (not necessarily based on experience or industry impact)
• Soft skills: see the potential in the candidate; eager to learn and eager to grow; growth mindset; curiosity, awareness, flexibility
• entry to senior journey: focus on a feature then a product then a product area then a product line

*Mid-level:*

• aptitude: Identifying foundational questions; competent at their craft; can take a research project of medium complexity; comfortable running a study end to end; demonstrating a level of methodological expertise; understanding the buyer’s journey; focusing on the soft skills and good in both methods; thinking critically versus execution; Critical thinking skills.
• socialization: regular updates; buy-in; bringing people along throughout the course of the research; actionable findings (not necessarily long range; “what can the team use this for today?“); able to integrate into teams and identify the best questions to ask; creating their road-map in connection with a senior researcher, manager, product team
• autonomously run evaluative studies; generative or complex descriptive research might require guidance; comfortable running projects on their own but not constantly going out and identifying own research opportunities

*Senior level:*

• Leadership skills: serving as a model for other researchers; model excellence (quality, rigor, and ability to work across the corporation); able to influence and build relationships with other teams; increasing level of ownership; have an impact across the company, operating almost fully autonomously, work cross-functionally and make an impact on a broader area, navigate organizational complexity and ambiguity. leading and shaping others’ roadmaps
• Soft skills: growth mindset - want to grow and want to learn and take feedback; willing to go on deep-dives and learn something new
• Strategies: identifying foundational questions, integrate previous research, identify white space and gaps and innovative opportunities, working within a huge number of constraints (time, money, niche recruit) and creative about getting the information they need and how that information fits in the larger strategic vision for the company (impact on the team and across the company; cross-functional)

**Education**:

• Having a degree is never a requirement and, after mid-level, education isn’t the key factor.
• diversity of experience is exciting (industry and consultancy = interesting); startup experience and internship and industry experience are more important and valuable; hiring managers and team leads are interested in what people are interested in
• use education for reference and context (skills) in new grads + entry level
• advanced degrees can be helpful as a method for career transition; considered as similar to work experience by hiring managers (grad = 2 years; PhD = 4 years)
• education teaches people how to learn; education is another indication of who likes to learn or as a proxy to assess growth mindset
• team dynamics: education is interesting when the profile is different from the team profile; build out a team with different education experiences; different perspective or teaching something new or a new skill; diversity of thinking

*What kind of tests, discussion points or probes do you think are relevant in interviews for a user experience researcher?*

• Portfolio presentation: assessing previous work to evaluate the candidates based on their research methodology, product sense, and breadth of work. The presentation delivery can showcase their storytelling and communication skills.

• Case studies (on-site, take-home, collaborative): Assess how the candidates approach the problem and how they would solve it. However, they can create a bias and aren’t an effective measuring way. Portfolio presentations are more valuable.

• UX strategy and impact of the research: Evaluate the extent to which candidates understand the business strategy, the outcome the business is trying to achieve, their ability to tie the research objectives and methods they plan to use to the business context, clearly frame the problem, and demonstrate the impact of the research.

• Behavioral interviews: assess how the candidates approach and think about problems, collaborate with stakeholders, asking the right questions helps determine some of their traits: self-awareness, intellectual honesty, and intellectual curiosity.

• Asking the right questions can tell you so much about a candidate:

“Tell me about a time you failed”: people’s approach, resilience, and how they deal with failure.

“Tell me about a time you influenced direction / fixed something”: ownership mentality and ability to operate autonomously.

*When we talk about portfolios and people coming in for more senior roles, tell me about a recent portfolio that you thought was impressive:*

• Strategic innovation work: Bringing in a white space opportunity, and showcasing a strong methodological approach by breaking down a very broad question into pieces and phases with actual milestones and outcomes in each phase.
• Benchmarking, identifying a need to standardize across multiple product lines for organization-wide buy-in, exploring multiple ways to accomplish the same results, impacting the users and company (growth metrics)
• Combining qualitative and quantitative methods to Invent a new way of measuring things, and partnering with a data analyst. Humanizing the process with trials and honesty (what worked, what didn’t work, what’s stuck)
• Initiating a project and researching children, partnering with a data scientist to get better insights, controversial findings with buy-in : taking a business risk to achieve good outcomes.

General Advice :

• Connect with people and understand what they’re looking for and see if it’s a good fit
• Ownership mindset: “you don’t need to ask for permission to take responsibility” (Zoom)
• Growth mindset and self-awareness and teachable with those two things
• Demonstrate impact