UX researcher responsibilities that are often overlooked
This blog series is a continuation of the UX Research Checklist series by Brian Utesch and Theresa Nguyen. An analysis was done to understand the role of a UX Researcher looking across a sampling of 100 publicly available job postings. The intent was to take a snapshot in time of different characteristics across a mix of companies to develop an aggregate profile of a successful job candidate. The insights from this analysis can be reused by a variety of audiences to shape job descriptions or create professional development plans to be most competitive in the job market.
Previous Posts:
☑️ UX Researcher Characteristics: An Analysis of 100 UX Researcher Open Job Postings
🔬 The UX Researcher’s Main Responsibility…Research, of course!
📈 All the Research Data Has Been Gathered…Now What?
🖇 Business Acumen For the UX Researcher
👩🏻💻 UX Researcher Responsibilities that Are Often Overlooked
Thank you for following along to these blog posts up to this point. In our last blog post, we will discuss “miscellaneous” job responsibilities. These are the job responsibilities that kept coming up in our analysis, but did not fit neatly into the other 3 groupings of research, analyzing and presenting insights and business acumen. Perhaps these are responsibilities that are often overlooked, or are up-and-coming responsibilities for the UX Researcher. From personal experience, I can say that although they are in this “miscellaneous responsibilities” category, they are still important to the role of the UX Researcher. These assorted responsibilities are developing research operations (found on 41/100 job postings), collaborating (85/100) and mentoring (22/100), contributing to a work culture (12/100) and keeping up to date with UX methodology and market trends (13/100).
#1 Developing Research Operations
I have been lucky enough to work with an amazing Research Operations team during my time in IBM’s Cloud, Data and AI Organization. The Research Operations team is a necessity in an organization as large as ours with 89 UX Researchers (as of September 15, 2021).
Eric Mahlstedt, Global Head of User Research at IBM Cloud, Data and AI, reiterated the importance of having a ResearchOps team:
I believe that large shared service organizations can accelerate their impact and growth through establishing operations teams. Our ReOps team acts as an experimentation engine and force multiplier that continuously scales practices that benefit our researchers, stakeholders and customers.
Whether it’s managing our entire toolchain, growing our recruitment panels, making our insights accessible to the entire company, teaching other teams how to conduct and use research, or promoting our contribution to business results, Tracy’s team increases the expectancy and execution of successful work.
For those who are not fortunate enough to have access to a dedicated Research Operations team, the responsibilities of maintaining a consistent research operation will fall to the UX Researcher. These responsibilities can sound daunting. For example, in a job posting at Spotify, they indicated that their UX Researcher will need to “develop and innovate on [Spotify’s] mixed-method user research practices.”
These responsibilities within research operations can include the following (with more responsibilities seen in the figure below):
- Participant scheduling & recruitment (Autodesk)
- Managing incentives (Autodesk)
- Budgeting (Paypal)
- Setting up the research lab (Autodesk)
- Maintaining an internal research repository (Rover.com)
- Evolving the research toolkit (Mach49)
- Research requests system for stakeholders (Indigo)
- Standardization of the following: Usability standards (Cigna), Research best practices (Indigo), Research templates (Texas Instruments), Reporting (Texas Instruments), Documentation (Indigo), Participant recruitment (Tanium), Processes (more below)
Evolving and standardizing processes in particular was one of the responsibilities under managing research operations that seemed to keep turning up during our analyses (15/100). Many teams that UX Researchers join may not only not have a dedicated Research Operations team, but may include a very small number of UX-ers to date. UX Researchers may therefore have to create a lot of these operations from scratch.
Develops new processes for the improvement of moderating and running tests. (Insomniac Games)
Drive the continuous improvement of the UXR team as we build the maturity of our function. (American Express)
These are just some of the Research Operations responsibilities that were found in the UX Researcher job postings. Seeing all these truly make me grateful for the awesome Research Operations team we have in Cloud, Data and AI at IBM.
#2 Collaboration and Mentorship
Collaboration seems like an obvious responsibility, but who the UX Researchers will be collaborating with may vary company to company. An insight our analyses exhibited was the equal importance between Designers and Product Managers, both were identified in the job postings 80 times and 82 times, respectively. Other roles that UX Researchers can expect to collaborate with are engineers, other researchers developers, marketing, data science and more.
Therefore, the ability to work cross-functionally is very important for today’s UX Researcher. The Researcher will need to establish positive relationships with cross functional partners to help teams more deeply empathize and recognize customer requirements. UX Researchers will need to communicate, defend, and build consensus across diverse teams. The responsibility of collaboration remains paramount and is why it was seen in virtually every job posting analyzed.
In relation to collaborating, mentoring was also found as an emerging responsibility UX Researchers. This may include not only other UX Researchers, especially junior UX Researchers, but also Designers as well. Lastly, business teams may need to be mentored to an extent regarding UX if they are unfamiliar to the domain.
#3 Contributing to Work Culture
Aside from develop research operations, collaboration and mentorship, many job postings for the UX Researcher also listed contributing to the work culture and environment. This includes helping to promote and foster a culture of user research. For example at Blackrock, an American multinational investment management corporation, this includes “building a culture around live experiments for the UX team.” In addition to building the culture around user testing, helping to build a culture around empathizing with the user is also a valuable asset to the team (see more about “Being a User Advocate” in Blog 4). Many job postings also listed “inspiring others” specifically in their list of job responsibilities. The UX Researcher not only has to deliver research and insights that are meaningful to the organization, but also inspire and motivate the organization to take action.
Inspire our product and design team to deliver excellent solutions that fit business/product goals while providing customer value (Zinier)
#4 Keeping up-to-date with UXR Methodology and Market Trends
The last job responsibility that we will discuss in this blog series is keeping up-to-date with UX research methodology and market trends. The UX Researcher will always have to be learning and evolving with the field of UX. This means identifying and adopting new and emerging user experience research techniques, technologies and methodological process improvements to improve efficiency and value of the user research data collected. An education in UX is valuable but is limited to the resources and knowledge of the time in which it was received. The UX Researcher needs to constantly refine their skills in order to stay relevant in this ever-changing field. Attending conferences like UXPA and UX Y’all is a great way to stay up-to-date with UX methodology and developments.
Additionally, it is helpful to stay up-to-date with market trends with your offering. Any opportunity to collect passive insights from internal sources, academic institutions, industry reports, etc. is an opportunity for UX Researchers to get quick access to research, data and trends that could aid in providing valuable insights to your product team. For example, conducting secondary research, or “desk research” could streamline the generation of data. As I mention in Blog 3, I personally like going through product reviews on sites like G2 and Trust Pilot to actively monitor user pain-points and the strengths of some of the competitor products.
Conclusion
Although this grouping of job responsibilities have found themselves slotted into the “miscellaneous responsibilities” category, they are job responsibilities that are either so engrained that we forgot to think about them (e.g., collaborating with your team, mentoring others), are often overlooked (e.g., contributing to a work culture, keeping up-to-date with UXR methodology and market trends) or are possibly newer to the UX community and will become more prevalent as time goes on (e.g., developing standardized research operations). Our team hopes to repeat this analysis periodically in order to determine what job responsibilities and skills are changing for the UX Researcher, or order to provide UX Researchers with an objective benchmark of capability.
Acknowledgements
I wanted to give a special thanks to everyone who provided quotes to aid with these blogs. Thank you to Rogelio Carrillo, Tracy McGoldrick, and Eric Mahlstedt for providing your input. Thank you to Brian Still, who taught me the fundamentals of industry research while I was in graduate school and whom I referenced during this blog series. Lastly, thank you to Kaitlyn Ouverson who provided feedback on these blog posts.
