Why the future of UX Researcher is so bright?

Hello Friends,

Myself Prince Pal Singh, Working as a UI/UX Strategist at Think 360 Studio.

My job is to follow the user-centered design process and solves complex problems through user research, expert analysis, prototyping, a collaborative design with stakeholders and users. In nutshell, we are defining unforgettable customer experiences.

So,

What is UX Research?

The well-ordered examination of users and their demands, to add to the perception and awareness into the process of designing the user experience is the UX Research.

Diversified tools, methods, and techniques are ruled in to establish facts, reaching consequences, and unveil the glitches, hence attaining important information which can be recommended into the design process. 

A 2017 report into the user research industry found that 81% of executives surveyed agreed that user research makes their company more efficient. 86% believe that UX research adds to the quality of their products and services.

Who is a UX Researcher?

A UX Researcher aims to gather data from the users by means of taking surveys in the field, conducting usability studies, involving interviews, contextual inquiries, card sorting. They are in collaboration with project designers and project managers. After a UX Researcher finishes with the collection of the needful data he comes back to the design team and assists and informs them with new features, the area of developments, etc that should be worked upon. 

Their objective is to gather and interpret the accumulated information according to how a user wants the product to be, thereby reducing the cost of delivering a successful product. 

Why UX Researcher is needed for your next start-up?

The role of user experience is nowadays more in demand and eminent since a UX Researcher discovers the user behavior and needs and rectifies how they can be reached to give full satisfaction to the user. 

According to Payscale, the average UX Researcher salary is $82,565 per year with estimated 10-year job growth of 19%. A UX Researcher has the opportunity to make a notable difference —on the products and services that people interact with every day, technically implying a greater impact on the business. 

The answer to the question of why does your start-up needs a UX Researcher can be elaborated in the following way:

Research Planning and Recruitment

A properly planned layout for research with the mentioned research objectives will be functional in order to target your end-users for specific research studies. Rather than each department doing the customer-talking, there should be one master efficient in taking feedback i.e., a UX Researcher. 

Data Collection

A devoted UX Researcher never works on guess works and unfounded assumptions. Usability sessions, quantitative surveys, stakeholder and client interviews are taken up, for obtaining a proper understanding of your user’s perspective.  

Data Analysis

Your user experience researcher will take out extracts from web instrumentation tools. UX if studied genuinely, recommendations are turned out for the product team and analysis is done to transform user insights into significant suggestions.  

Presentation of Insights

The UX Researcher defines the major glitches felt through the user’s end in a well-regulated manner so that the UX designer works upon the development of the product to meet the desired expectations. 

Strategy

The UX Researcher closely works with not just the UX team, but with all the departments to learn different reactions of particular clients to form strategies from their reactions in order to come out with the best feasible end call. 

What does a UX Researcher do?

If a UX Researcher relies on qualitative research, he equally relies on quantitative research as well. 

Talking about quantitative research, we talk about measuring something. How many users visited on some particular page on your website? What is the number of visitors that actually purchased?

The qualitative research interrogates the reasons or the motivations behind the above questions. Why did the user click? Why did the user purchase? 

The UX Researcher follows the following methodologies to fight the above questions:

Observation:  UX Researcher will ask the user about unspoken areas and will take behavioral clues about how the user feels about the product. 

Understanding: As a UX Researcher, it is their priority to comprehend what is their user’s perspective related to the product. As explained by the Nielsen Norman Group, the user’s mental model is what the user believes about the system at hand. This helps in getting an idea of how the users think so that it might help while designing a new product.

Analysis: Patterns and trends are identified after the insights are analyzed about the user’s perspective. UX researchers share it with the team so that logical design decisions are carried out.

Face-to-face interviews: UX Researcher would know better than anybody what psychology of the user he wants to learn about. Might ask specific questions, or enter just in a free-flowing conversation. In a face-to-face interview, the researcher would be in a position to learn about how the user reacts to certain tasks.

User surveys:  Conducting surveys and questionnaires online would help target a broad user group. A low-cost way of accumulating a high mass of responses is through surveys. Conducting surveys and questionnaires online would help target a broad user group. 

The Future of UX Researcher

It is not enough to guess assumptions as to what the customer wants with the increasing importance of UX in all digital-based products and services in all digital-based products and services. Technical and non-technical research is important to understand if the product has met the customer’s expectations or not. With the rising need of knowing about how the user is feeling, the need for A UX Researcher is rising. 86% believe that UX Researchers improve the quality of their products and services. 

7,913 professionals with UX Research skills have changed job and company in the past 12 months in the US, according to LinkedIn. 

This depicts the 17% of the entire talent pool. Still, the average talent pool movement across all skills sits at around 2%. The data suggests that it is easy to move talent. However, there are around 5,191 jobs that require UX skills in the US-listed yet only on LinkedIn, demanding more of the UX Researchers. 

The future of UX research is to function as a “multiplier”

As Microsoft has adopted a learn-it-all culture and given up on the know-it-all mentality the company emphasizes on learning new methods and techniques of working. In fact, innovative and new pathways are very important for the product team that makes them connected to the user. 

Conducting interviews, focus groups, concept value studies, site visits, and usability studies are important for creating products that respond to customer needs. 

A key evolutionary step for us is to figure out how to scale the application of these skills to meet the newfound demand. The answer does not lie in adding more researchers who focus on learning on behalf of the many. It’s in expanding the role of researchers to focus on empowering everyone to learn.

In her book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, Liz Wiseman, she has given a complete global study of organizations and their employee functioning. She studied that where employees were encouraged to learn and experiment, had double the employee productivity.

The future of UXR serves two segments- the user that uses the product and the product makers who build them. Understanding and empathy for both segments are very important in order to seek the validations for the product. 

The future of UX research is about co-experienced learning

The multiplier does not exclude others, in a real sense, it takes a long everybody along the journey of learning. The future UXRs will be enjoying the pursuit of co-experienced learning and building where they build collaborative relations with the product teams. 

We have never and we can never own the voice of the customer. No CEO, VP, general manager, program manager, marketer, engineer, has never owned the customer’s voice. It is just the customer voice that has to be heard, understood and interpreted. UXR will rightfully do that in collaboration with other actively working teams. 

The future of UX research is in powerful moments

The technology is moving fast and our product teams are moving faster.

A lockstep relationship has to be maintained between the two. 

It has to be noted that the ability to create customer insights will not serve the purpose of interpreting the customer’s actual need. There will be a definite need to invest in creating powerful moments of customer connection for the development of the product team. 

We need to accept that we are still on the page of an on-going cultural shift within many of the organizations. The critical evaluation of the impact potential of each research project we must pursue.

‘Moment potential=(overall importance of project) (direct product team participation)’

Eventually, we will realize the more important projects, the more it is required for the direct participation of the product team with the customer. It is also important for the organization to learn how to more effectively leverage customer insights. 

The future of UX research is bright

For instance, at Microsoft, the CEO has realized how important the role of a UXR is - for the future of the company. It is important to build upon customer obsession as what the company does and cultivate a growth perspective as to how do we do it. 

Learning from a customer has to be the top priority of an organization, to attract wealthy opportunities to innovate and drive impact by communicating the research expertise with other departments. With the growth of demand, there will be many new and exciting UX Research challenges. Of course, the upcoming challenges would demand the best talent in the industry. 

Evidently, UX Researcher- the new profession, will shortly be a common profession as the teams are growing, the demands for UX Researcher will but naturally be increasing to an extent. Already, 79% of the UX Researchers are below the level of the manager, according to data from LinkedIn and around 5,000 jobs are listed and with proportionately low rate of application number in return.