How do I start if I want to get into the UX Research field? (Update)

Joe Marcantano: Drew. Happy holidays.

Drew Freeman: Happy holidays to you. Happy holidays to everyone else. Hope you've had a great holiday. Are continuing to have great holidays.

Joe Marcantano: So, as we're recording this, we're a few days before Christmas, but this episode won't get released until after Christmas. We'll be releasing this one just before the new year. And we wanted to release our most popular episode this, time.

Drew Freeman: This is an early one that we did. And you're gonna hear our thoughts about how to get into the UX research field, if you're interested, and how to get started, even if you might not have a job that has UX research anywhere in the title.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah, so this is the rerocast. This is episode five. Given that it was an early episode, I was still kind of learning the ropes on audio editing. The sound level should be a lot better now. They should be a lot more consistent. And we'renna be back in, one week with an all new episode on January 6th.

Drew Freeman: So I've got two requests for you before we go and give you this episode. One, please share this episode with someone who's trying to get into the UXR field. That'd be really helpful for us to reach new listeners and hopefully helpful to the person that you share it with. And two, please share the podcast with the world. Whether that's leaving a review, giving it a, like sharing it with a friend, help us continue to grow, we'd really appreciate it. That would be your holiday gift to us.

Joe Marcantano: I would ask for a small additional gift in that, you know, once. Drew, I'm not sure if you're traveling or not. I'm traveling for the holidays, but once we get back, and sit down to record, I'd love to have a bank of questions that people have submitted so that we can start off the new year with some listener submitted questions. So if you have a question, if, if you have something you want to hear us talk about, send that over to inside uxrmail@gmail.com.

Drew Freeman: Please and thank you.

Joe Marcantano: Awesome. Well, Drew, if I don't talk to you again before then, enjoy, your holidays and your New Year's. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays. And, to everyone else out there, we will be back in one week with all new episodes.

Drew Freeman: Happy holidays and we'll see you soon.

Joe Marcantano: Welcome to the show. Drew, how are you?

Drew Freeman: I am doing well. I just finished with a little tech project, so hopefully things go smoother for me now.

Joe Marcantano: Well, there you go. I am coming today with a question.

Drew Freeman: Let's hear it.

Joe Marcantano: All right, this is another big one. It's I want to be a uxr. How do I start?

Drew Freeman: Yeah, I hear this question a lot and, like, a lot of answers in the UX research world. The answer is it depends. So for this fictional scenario, let's say that you're not coming directly from school with a UX designer research background. Let's say you're maybe you're coming from school in a different field or maybe you've had a career before.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah, maybe you've had even like a related research field, like you're coming from academia. But UX research, while there's some overlap, is a little bit different. So what do you think the first thing somebody who wants to start doing UXR should do?

Drew Freeman: So hopefully this will be a good conversation for folks because I know that both of us came from essentially this kind of background where neither of us went to school or had formal education in ux and we both had a career before we stumbled into ux. So for me, my answer is really just start doing things. Whether that is, you know, if you're someone who has to fix problems, talk to someone before you start fixing the problem. Like, hey, I heard about this problem that other folks in my role are having, or, here's a problem that I'm having. Let me interview someone else who has a similar role to me. Interview someone who has a different role to me and see how they're experiencing the problem. Like, there's a lot of things that you can do when you have a job that are UX research related and will add value to your current job.

Joe Marcantano: You know, the thing that I love about what you said there, Drew, is that you and I have completely different approaches to this. It sounds like. Because it sounds like you are a jump right in and do it, whereas I am much more of a. I want to gather a bunch of information and I want to take in everything before I start doing anything.

Drew Freeman: It's funny because I would say, like, right now I'm doing some shopping for a relatively pricey item, and I am very much looking at all of the reviews and

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Drew Freeman: doing a whole lot of research. But that was not my experience when it came to starting UXR things. I just got thrown in, didn't know what I was doing, and just kind of Went. So I don't really have recommendations other than what I did.

Joe Marcantano: Well, how about I'll kind of take the lead on this first half on, like, if you want to do some background research and learning about being a uxr. And then when we get to the point of, like, actually jumping in, we'll have you take the lead.

Drew Freeman: Then I'll talk about how you survive and keep your head above water in the deep end.

Joe Marcantano: Perfect. So, for me, the first thing that I always do is I look for a book. I'm a big reader. I love reading. And so when I had decided that UXR was. Was the thing I wanted to do was the change I wanted to make, the profession I wanted to join, the first thing I did was go out and I bought probably 10 or 15 books, you know, all with varying degrees of helpfulness. And I've got a list here of the five that I found most helpful. And while there was an element of this is how you do research, for me it was more. I wanted a glimpse into the. The life, what it was like, what did people who actually do research do all day?

Drew Freeman: That's really interesting. Yeah. Hit me with it.

Joe Marcantano: The five books that I went downstairs, looked at my bookshelf, and the five that I found the most valuable were how to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard. Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries by Steve Portugal. Storytelling for User Experience by Kevin Brooks and Whitney Quenberry. Think Like a UX Researcher by David Travis and Philip Hodgson. And the book that was my absolute favorite is called Just Enough Research by, Eria Hall.

Drew Freeman: Yeah, so give me the Cliff Notes or what you found each one super valuable for.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah. So when we're talking about how to measure anything, it was this notion that I just, like the title says, anything can be measured, because I had this view of, like, you can't measure a thing like happiness. You can't measure a thing like delight. But it turns out you can. You can come up with some quantifiable ways to ask people to respond, and you can compare those responses to one another. And maybe you can't assign numerical value to everything, but you can certainly rank against each other. And in some level, then you are beginning to quantify those things.

Drew Freeman: Yeah, you can measure anything. The key is, how do I measure something? Well, correct.

Joe Marcantano: Doorbells, Danger and Dead Batteries by Steve Portugal. that's one that I really loved because it was kind of a collection of stories. It was a collection of what happened and how they did things. And for me, this was the biggest glimpse into what being a researcher full time could be like.

Drew Freeman: Okay, okay, so tell me about, storytelling for user experience.

Joe Marcantano: So that one and folks who have listened to the first few episodes'already heard me say this a couple of times. I think the readout is the most important thing a researcher does. And that was just how to tell. Tell the story, how to do your readout, because your readout should be a story, how to tell it, how to be engaging in your presentation, how to include the right things, how to tailor it to your audience.

Drew Freeman: Yeah, I love that. Storytelling is absolutely one of those areas where a researcher can really set themselves apart. Set themselves apart from the field and showcase their skills.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah. And then the last two, Think like a UX researcher and just enough research. Those were a little bit more of like getting down into the nitty gritty. How to do research, how to frame your thought patterns, how to start thinking like a researcher, how to know when you should be doing research and when you shouldn't. These were things that for me were kind of the replacement to the formal training that some folks are getting in college now because I didn't go to school for this.

Joe Marcantano: So I know that you said you kind of dove in, but do you have any favorite books or boot camps or trainings or classes or anything that somebody might be able to sink their teeth into to start learning?

Drew Freeman: Yeah. So my kind of education when I was first starting in on this was more about usability than it was user experience.

Joe Marcantano: Okay.

Drew Freeman: And that is a nuanced distinction. So user experience is like the broad category of how humans interact with whatever it is. For me, that learning came in a computer software environment. So how people are interacting with the software, how people are interacting with their environment and the software at the same time, that sort of thing. Usability, on the other hand, is more the mechanical aspects, the more individual aspects. It's more about where do I put this button or color schemes, that sort of thing. It's a little bit more designy. Did that explanation make any sense whatsoever?

Joe Marcantano: It completely did. No. You did a fantastic job there of giving us a really good distinction between the two.

Drew Freeman: Okay. So the books that I was reading were more on the usability side of things. So the two that really jumped to mind for

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Drew Freeman: me are Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug and the Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. Really, they're both really talking about how to make things easier and simpler and less error prone. You know, it's a lot of the stuff that we do, but just with a Slightly more design bent.

Joe Marcantano: Awesome. Yeah. The Design of Everyday Things is actually one that I own as well. And it's a book that I very much enjoyed.

Drew Freeman: I think it's one that just about every person in the UX field owns.

Joe Marcantano: That's probably true. so let's say you've done the reading or maybe you've got the books on order from Amazon. What do you think the next step? Somebody could or should do that. They want to jump into this field.

Drew Freeman: Yeah. So for me, the most beneficial thing that I did was talk to other people who were already doing UX research or UX things. One of my early mentors had a catchphrase that I really like, which is, if you're doing usability alone, you're doing it wrong. I love that and I think that that really resonates with me still to this day. So I would say try to find a community, whether that's a one on one mentor, whether that is a, larger community on the Internet, something like Reddit or Facebook or LinkedIn or, you know, wherever you might try to find that community. I think community is a really good way to learn, at least for me. I learn really well from other people rather than necessarily from books. So that's kind of why I went the route that I went.

Joe Marcantano: I love that. That's great. And it feels like you're reading off my cheat sheet and my notes here because I also have find a mentor. Find somebody you can shadow. You know, anyone who listened to the first episode knows that I broke into this because of a mentor. It's someone who I'm still very close to and, still who I run questions by even today. And having that resource is just invaluable.

Drew Freeman: Yeah, I wouldn't be, I wouldn't have gotten introduced to UX research at all without a coworker who was already involved and needed help and brought me in. So she was instrumental in helping me with that very first project and writing my very first discussion guide. And then after that, after, I kept doing more things and kept hitting my head against various walls as I was learning, I really learned who at my company was already doing this, who was already good at it, and just started asking them a whole lot of questions, which of course is good UX research practice in general. So. Win. Win.

Joe Marcantano: Of course. Yeah. some things that I wrote down for, you know, maybe not everyone has access to a mentor. Maybe not everybody knows somebody already in the field. There's a group on Facebook that I really like called User Research Collective, and there's also a group on LinkedIn that I really like called UX HCI Researcher. Those are both pretty active groups. There's people posting and answering questions just about every day. Another place you could go to look is ADP list. I did a quick search on ADP list before recording here and there were several UX researchers offering to be mentors. So definitely some places you can check out there.

Drew Freeman: And I would also tell people, don't be afraid to put yourself out there. If there's someone that you like what they say, on LinkedIn or Reddit or Facebook, don't be afraid to send him a message and say, hey, I'm looking to get into the field. Do you mind if we chat for 20 minutes?

Joe Marcantano: Yeah, I have certainly myself had several of those coffee chats. And you know, it always depends on what else is going on and how much time I have available. But I think that most people want a way to give back and if there's somebody who's eager and wants to learn, that's a great way to give back.

Drew Freeman: Absolutely.

Joe Marcantano: Another place that I think is really good where you can do some learning, maybe do a little networking is conferences. And you know, especially in the post Covid world, remote conferences that are low cost or free are very much a thing. They are not hard to find.

Drew Freeman: Yeah, that's not something that I ever really had access to, but my kind of replacement to that was the events and the internal company trainings that we put on at the company that I was working for at the time. You know, they weren't huge groups, but there was enough of a group where I could get that kind of networking feel, meet people that I hadn't met at the company, talk about ux, all that sort of thing.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah, that is definitely a bonus to working at a larger company where you've got some other people who might have overlapping interests or are also interested in uxr for sure.

Drew Freeman: Okay, so is there anything else that you would recommend before you start doing UX in general?

Joe Marcantano: No, I think for me the biggest thing is find some resources and then find someone to talk to. Find a person, a mentor, whoever. Or maybe listen to a podcast that answers your favorite UXR questions.

Drew Freeman: Nudge, nudge.

Joe Marcantano: Exactly. Just find a place where you can kind of start absorbing the information a little bit.

Drew Freeman: Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. Okay, so someone's gone down the path that

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Drew Freeman: you took and done some kind of initial homework and familiarization with the field and what it looks like. What advice do you have for them.

Joe Marcantano: Next, I'm going to frame this advice for someone who is either looking to make a drastic career change or maybe coming out of school. And they didn't study this specifically in school, so they're not working someplace where they could just start doing little bits of research. The thing that you are going to need is a portfolio and you're going to need a project or two in there. And one of the pieces of advice that I have given folks before that's had a fair degree of success is go to your favorite nonprofit, ask them what questions they have, what do they need to know about the services they provide or about the donors who are coming in? What gaps can you fill in for them for free? And then talk to them and get it set up so that in exchange for doing the research for free for them, you get to feature it in your portfolio.

Drew Freeman: I love that advice. One, you get that hands on experience and two, you get to give back to a, nonprofit that you appreciate.

Joe Marcantano: Exactly. And the nonprofits for the most part should feel pretty incentivized to do this. UX research is not cheap and so a lot of nonprofits can't afford to do it. And if you can set up a way to make them feel comfortable with whatever NDAs for whatever information that they keep on their either beneficiaries or donors, then this could absolutely be a win win.

Drew Freeman: Yeah. And the nonprofits that I've volunteered with generally have a pretty good sense of like, hey, we don't know the answer to this, but man, it would make our lives so much easier and we could do our mission so much better if we did know the answer to this.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah, exactly. Maybe they're looking for better ways to accomplish whatever their mission are. Maybe they don't know enough about their donors and they want to know how they can better target their marketing towards their donors. Like, these are all questions that you could provide really easy answers to for them or at least reduce the uncertainty for them.

Drew Freeman: And you likely will have multiple avenues that you could take to get the answers to those questions. You can do. Obviously you'll probably do interviews, but maybe they have some sort of website or app and you could do a usability test on that app for them. You might even be able to do some quantitative diving into data that they already have.

Joe Marcantano: So that's kind of an idea for a first project or maybe a first and second project. If you don't work someplace where it's really possible for you to do it as a part of your work.

Drew Freeman: I would Push back on that a little bit just because I think that you can incorporate UX research principles into just about any task. I, I struggle to think of a role or an industry where you couldn't start incorporating at least some UX research principles.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah, I don't necessarily disagree there. I just think that it could be harder for folks. Maybe they have a boss who doesn't have a buy, who has no reason to let them do it, or maybe they're just not employed at all at the time.

Drew Freeman: For sure.

Joe Marcantano: but let's talk about somebody who has a job, has an understanding boss, and has the ability to start kind of incorporating little pieces of UXR into their work. What advice would you give for them? How do they start off?

Drew Freeman: Yeah, so one of the things that we actually did at my last job was help people at our clients, at our customers start incorporating ux. And the people that we were talking to were often kind of project managery or fixing problem tickets in the software, that sort of thing. So one of the first things that we always said was whenever you get an issue ticket, give the person who submitted the ticket a call and talk to them for 10, 15 minutes and ask them a bunch of questions about, you know, what job are you trying to do while you're experiencing this problem? What task are you trying to complete? What does your environment look like when you're running into it? Are there other upstream or downstream things that are impacted or impacting this problem? That right there is a pretty basic but good in an in depth interview. Yeah, it's only one, it's only one participant, but it's a good start.

Joe Marcantano: There's nothing that says that you can't use an n of 1 as you're jumping off point. Maybe your n of 1 identifies a problem and then your next step is to validate the problem to see if other people have it.

Drew Freeman: For sure, an N of one is, I'm not goingna say always, but almost always better than AN N of 0.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah.

Drew Freeman: So another thing that I really like the idea of and did a lot of is called hallway testing. So the idea of hallway testing is that I'm gonna put together a quick task in my office or in my cube and then I'm just going toa walk down the hallway and have my colleagues run this and see what they think. It's a really low cost,

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Drew Freeman: really easy way to do some usability testing and get some, some reasonable results. Yeah, we're probably not operating with our target user groups, but again, if it's One of those questions where I just need someone with a brain to be able to answer it and not someone with specific industry or educational background. Hallway testing is a great way to get started. Like you can, you can knock out one of those in with multiple people in 30 minutes to, to an hour.

Joe Marcantano: I really love that. Especially if you're new to it. It reduces the risk of, if you're doing interviews with customers, they'ren toa know what company you work for and you know, maybe you're new to it, maybe you're nervous, maybe it's your first couple of interviews. I would much rather fumble through interviews when I'm new to it with friends and coworkers and people who are a little more trusted, rather than risking embarrassing my employ employer with a customer.

Drew Freeman: So everybody has an internal process of some sort that they work with and every single internal process has issues. So identify an issue that you have with an internal process. Like this part is always difficult. It always takes too long, it always causes me confusion. And then write a quick task, put them in that scenario where they're trying to accomplish the thing that the process is meant to accomplish and just watch and listen to what they're saying and see if they also run into the same problem.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah, I love that. Now everything that we've talked about thus far has been kind of primary research and you know, your first project could be secondary research too. You don't necessarily have to do interviews.

Drew Freeman: Yeah, for sure. again, if you're working at a job and you've got a little bit of time to do a side project, or you can carve out that time, talk to some of the data analytics folks and say, hey, is there a data set that I could maybe play with and just start looking to see if I can answer some questions. Again, you have to have a little bit of a stats background probably to do that sort of thing. But that's a way that if you're interested in that quant research in particular, that's a really good way to get started.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah, the whole goal of UX research is to inform the business decisions and maybe you've already got all the data right there. Maybe that data engineer down the hall is going to be able to give you the data set and you can find the answer for them and help reduce some risk.

Drew Freeman: I would very much posit that that data engineer down the hall has a lot of hypotheses that they would like to check out, but they just don't rise to the level of important and urgent enough for them. To look at, but they'd be happy for someone else to look at.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah, agreed. I think the biggest thing that we've both kind of danced around and neither one of us has outright said it, is just start doing stuff for sure.

Drew Freeman: So let's say that you're interested in just kind of jumping in and diving into that pool, but you're not employed anywhere and you're not quite sure how, like a local nonprofit that might work with you. Where might we suggest that folks go in order to try to get some of that, that research experience? I will, I'll answer this question myself. I would say that, you know, check out something like Fiverr or Reddit even, or you know, any of those like freelance gig kinds of places. And if you put it out there for free for five bucks, I don't know for sure, but that seems like a place where you might be able to get some bites.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah. And I think that the other place you could do is, you know, we talked earlier about finding a mentor, finding somebody to poke at, and ask questions, see if they'll assign you your a project. And it may not be something work related. They may say, hey, you know, go to the library and ask people what their gripes are about the library and where they're frustrated or some other public place. But they could help you generate some ideas for some, essentially free projects that you could do to kind of build a little bit base of experience.

Drew Freeman: Yeah, these, these first projects don't have to have a intrinsic or explicit business profit impact. These could be things that come from your own life. Like, hey, I'm always annoyed by how the, the local transit authority does signage. Or there's this website that I use all the time and I think it's just terribly designed. Well, maybe you can talk to some people and see if they have similar feelings and why it might be bad and what they're trying to do with that website.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah, that's a great distinction. We should call out in earlier episode when we were talking about getting buy in, we were talking about how it was important to demonstrate early on the value of research to get people bought in. That's not the goal here. The goal here is to get you, as somebody who wants to start doing some work in this field, familiar with the methods, get you comfortable with doing research, different goals so we don't need to drive a business decision.

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Drew Freeman: Right. And you can still practice how if I was presenting this for this business, how would I try to show them that this will have a business impact? But you get to do it in the kind of stress free environment of not actually having to present it to them.

Joe Marcantano: Exactly.

Drew Freeman: You can present it instead to a coworker or a friend or, you know, whoever is going to be a, friendly ear and also be able to give you feedback on your presentation skills or how you crafted the story and make sure that it's crafted in a way that makes sense to someone who isn't intimately involved with the subject matter.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah, I think you're exactly right. Well, any parting thoughts? Any final thoughts about if somebody wants to break into the field, how they should do it?

Drew Freeman: I would say go for it. I think UX and UX research is still at a point where it is not necessary to have a formal educational background in any sort of research field in order to make your way into the work. Joe and I are both examples of that and we both have very happy and fairly advanced careers at this point and neither of us has that formal education background.

Joe Marcantano: Yep, agreed. So I think with that, this is as good a place as Ann any to call it for this episode. I want to thank everybody for, for tuning in and listening. as always, give us a like and a subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. If you have a question that you want us to talk about, you can send that over to inside uxrmail.com and you can find us on all these big socials. We're at Inside uxr. If you want to support the show, you can do so through the link in the show notes or you can go to www.buymeacoffee.com InsideUxr. And with that, I am Joe Marantano.

Drew Freeman: And I'm Drew Freeman and we'll see you next time.

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