How did baby-sitting improve my user research skills?

Işık Cimilli
Bootcamp
Published in
4 min readJan 16, 2023
Photo of a child holding colourful crayons with their hands by Kristin Brown on Unsplash.

Young-adulthood is difficult. Many of us do different things until they find a job that requires our professional skills. I also did as someone who moved to a different country. I did baby-sitting to support myself financially while looking for an UXR opportunity. Now I have been working part-time in the UXR field for more than 10 months and I can affirm that baby-sitting gigs improved my UXR skills, but how?

  1. Stakeholder management and communication

Communication is a skill that we learn in interactions and with practice. My user research experience showed me that being a user researcher requires good communication skills for both written and oral communication since the days at work are spent by daily, weekly, 1:1 meetings with different colleagues, managers and stakeholders. Well-planned project comes from good communication with stakeholders and understanding of their needs. User researchers become a bridge between users and stakeholders accordingly.

Baby-sitting also requires good communication skills. Just with a small difference. Now you are interacting with caregivers, parents, toddlers and children instead of colleagues. Instead of mails, slack messages or presentations, the communication happens in a more casual setting, texting or so. Also you became a bridge between parents/caregivers and their child during time of baby-sitting. Still, I believe it is an amazing opportunity to practice.

I realize that the communication practice that I did during baby-sitting helped me to express myself better to managers, colleagues and different stakeholders. Also, I believe I have better understanding and active listening.

2. Understanding the needs

Every child has different needs and ways of communication. Like every product has their users and their needs. As a researcher, empathy is a core value for us and our work. We need to understand the needs of users and turn them into actionable insights. What is really funny to me is that it is also a required-skill for baby-sitting. I never imagined that the skills that I learned from qualitative method books and classes were going to help me during the baby-sitting journey.

Toddlers and children have limited words to express themselves. As baby-sitters, we need to understand the way they communicate by observing and interacting with them. I learned that everyone has their own way of expressing themselves during baby-sitting. As babysitters/researchers we have empathy and a general understanding of the needs which lead us to generate actionable insights. Whereas good understanding of the needs of children and parents makes them feel safe and enjoy the play-sessions, good understanding of the needs of users lead to products to get-the-job-done better.

3. Creativity

In my view, creativity is something that can be learned and developed. It can be practiced in many fields. And, yes, baby-sitting is also one of them. To be honest, interaction with humans-under-6 years-old helped my creativity a lot. I enjoy playing with Duplos, telling stories, drawings, and play-improvisations. Children’s interests change so quickly and baby-sitters need to adapt to them and learn new games, which also improved my adaptability.

I believe that creativity is also an important skill for the user research field. As researchers, we are using different tools like Miro, Mural, Dovetail etc. Our field is always improving with new softwares, methods. We need to adapt them to our work and also for the participants/users. How does creativity help? For example; we create ice breakers for participants with these tools before starting the interview to warm them up for the interview and the tool. And of course, we need to be creative preparing the decks, slides, workshops too!

4. Strategic thinking

Strategic thinking is a complex skill that requires many other skills such as creativity, flexibility, tailoring solutions, analysis, communication.. Researchers do not make the end decisions of products but they do offer some recommendations to the stakeholders with bringing new insights with the old ones.

It is not going to be surprising but strategic thinking can be also practiced while baby-sitting but yeah, it can! 😀Let’s have an example; It is 8 pm, almost sleep time and the child asked for ice-cream but the ice-cream shop is already closed and there is no ice-cream at home. As a baby-sitter, you tailor some solutions considering old insights. Considering what the child enjoys and the needs of the child by expressing the desire of ice-cream, you may offer for frozen fruits as ice-cream or just ask them to draw an ice-cream cone together.

Being good at baby-sitting does not make us good researchers but working as a baby-sitter can help us to train the skills that we need in professional life before we jump into our first “real” job.

I know that many people who work in the IT field were faced with lay-offs and some of them have been working in different fields from their profession to save the day for now. I hope this lay off wave is temporary and also this short article will give you a different perspective on how different fields can help you develop different skills that can benefit your career in the future.

See you next month with another article,

Isik

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Bootcamp
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Published in Bootcamp

From idea to product, one lesson at a time. Bootcamp is a collection of resources and opinion pieces about UX, UI, and Product. To submit your story: https://tinyurl.com/bootspub1

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