Non-research skills you need to be successful as a UX researcher

It’s a great time to be a UX researcher (UXR), or aspiring to be one. After long being misunderstood or undervalued, demand is now high. You’d be hard pressed to come across an organisation with a digital product that didn’t invest in some level of UX research to drive product and design decisions.

A UXR career path however, is not necessarily a well trodden or linear one. UX researchers come from a multitude of academic and professional backgrounds, which is one of the things I truly love about this profession.

Increasingly, training organisations are offering bootcamp-style courses which focus on the ‘hard skills’ or more technical skills required to be a UX researcher. Think: how to run a usability test, create prototypes, analyse qualitative data and the like. These are all incredibly important skills to acquire, however in my almost decade-long career in the research space I have come to learn that the non-research skills are almost, if not equally as important. Allow me to explain.

An average week as a UX Researcher

As a UX Researcher, I reflected upon how I spend a given week, and where my time and energy goes in helping my organisation to reach its goals. Sure, about half goes to actual research; recruitment, planning or preparing tests, interviews, and data analysis and deliverable creation. But the other half goes to the following:

• Project management
• Stakeholder engagement
• Evangelising research
• Processes & documentation

Strictly speaking, none of these skills are unique to the UXR profession, but they are essential to develop and improve upon if you want to be a successful UXR. I’ll break down why.

Project Management

Do your eyes glaze over at these very two words? Not gonna lie, mine do a bit too! But any research, big or small, will require some level of project management to run smoothly. You’ll need to:

• Define the scope (what are you going to research, what will you exclude and why)
• Plan your timelines and milestones
• Understand and account for any dependencies
• Define your stakeholders and collaborators, and associated roles and responsibilities
• Set some success criteria
• And of course track and communicate the status of your research project along the way to any interested parties

Neglecting these project management fundamentals will only lead to unclear expectations, subpar time management and maybe even some tears (or perhaps that’s just me). If you’re at the beginning of your career in UX research, the good thing is that project management happens in many parts of a given organisation, so you’re bound to have the opportunity to do some yourself, or at the least be exposed to effective project management practices.

Stakeholder Engagement

OK, this is a big one. Stakeholder engagement is something that in my opinion, can only really be learned by doing. You could read a million books on the topic, and probably get some helpful pointers, but you also need to live it (and probably make a lot of mistakes along the way).

Again, this can be done in any profession at almost any level. You have to find a way to work with, and probably at some level influence the people around you. As a UXR specifically, stakeholder engagement is so important because you can do as much research as you want, but if you can’t build trusting, symbiotic relationships with those you work with, your research may not have the impact you desire.

In a practical sense, as UXR stakeholder engagement looks like

• Staying up to date with other team roadmaps, planning and priorities to understand where any synergies exist. AKA: If people are working on something that you can add value to or simply need to know about as it may impact you
• Getting to know individuals and teams where you need to create allies and advocates for your work. UXR’s generally aren’t the people who will ultimately build or implement whatever changes your research is recommending. Get to know the people who are!
• Putting out fires and dealing with blowback. Once I had a C-Suite Executive in a very large corporation I was working for call me yelling down the phone about the findings of some research I’d done that he wasn’t happy with. I was early in my career and simply mortified, but it taught me two important lessons. One, you have to tailor your message to an audience. One size does not fit all. Two, research may uncover things that will be hard for others to hear, and stakeholders may challenge you. Be prepared to deal with those sticky situations as they inevitably arise

Evangelising Research

Any UXR working in-house will tell you, especially in an organisation still growing in UX maturity, that evangelising research comes with the territory. You will need to spend time:

• Promoting research as a discipline. Some people will have never heard of user research, much less worked directly with a UXR. You will need to communicate who you are, what you do, how you do it and how people can work with you
• Promoting your work. Not much use doing research if nobody knows about it but you, right? This is where writing, communication and presentation skills become really important. Finding ways to do this, especially in remote and dispersed working environments can be challenging and I find this is one area that I’m constantly working on and trying new things. Coming back to the project management topic, a well defined stakeholder map and communication plan set out at the beginning will be your best friend when it comes to ultimately sharing your work

If you’re aspiring to be a UXR I would suggest taking any opportunity you can to practice presenting to an audience, storytelling, and writing presentations. All this will put you in good stead for a UXR career, as they are really crucial skills.

Processes and documentation

YAWN I hear you say. Indeed, not the most glamorous part of the life of a UXR. However, well defined processes that are documented and not just living in your head will save a lot of headaches down the line. It’s important to get used to documenting just about everything and anything that will help create efficiency and clarity on how you do things. Practically this looks like:

• Documenting the processes and templates you use to do research. For example, how do you do recruitment? What are your processes for gaining informed consent from research participants? What about incentives? And so on. Write it down, and ‘future you’ will thank you when you need to go on leave, or train up a new team member, or simply explain to a colleague how X works
• Centralising your research toolkits, resources and deliverables in one place. Nothing worse than searching high and low for that document that you had one time in that one place and coming up with nothing. Save yourself the time and headache, and that of your colleagues too!

These skills really come down to being organised, prepared and opting a continuous improvement mindset. If you can demonstrate instances in which you’ve been able to do this in your working experience, you’ll be well on your way.

Conclusion

This list is by no means exhaustive in terms of the non-research skills needed to be a successful UXR, but if you’re aspiring to be one or wanting to go to the next level in your UXR career, these are the areas I would recommend to develop and refine. The good news is, you can find the opportunities to do this in many other professions.