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Every senior UX Researcher needs to be mixed methods
Why the additional responsibility of being senior-level and owning a program necessitates both strong quantitative and qualitative skills.
“Kris, I need to establish a metric baseline for the [new product] that we are implementing.” — Said a stakeholder on my team “Ok that sounds reasonable, do we have a list of people to send it out to?” — Said the optimistic researcher. “Yes, I can ask the PM.” — Mentioned the stakeholder “Great how many users does this new product have?” I curiously inquired… “Well, right now, we don’t have any users.”
It feels like it was only last week (how cliche) that I was the only UX researcher on a team of 20+ product designers. Unfortunately, at the time, and for the first half of when I was there, I wasn’t good at flat-out denying the need of a project. Initially, instead of turning down certain projects, I would just safely push out the timeline. My go-to line would be, “We can definitely evaluate this, but there are a lot of requests right now, so we’ll have to revisit this in a couple of weeks.” At the time, it felt like a pretty safe move, especially considering being the only UX Researcher, I could say that I needed more support, and until that happens, we will keep delaying projects. It wasn’t until the later part of my stint that I started to realize that not all UX research requests are equal in value.
I had an epiphany when that stakeholder wanted to run a survey on a brand-new product that had no users. I had so many requests from other different stakeholders, but hey, at least they clarified hey clarified they had the names of around four prospective users that could eventually use the product. The research goals were still somewhat precarious; they wanted to run a survey with a sample size of four users to establish a baseline using a UX metric. A baseline for what ? No one uses the product yet! How are we going to measure the product baseline if the people we want to survey are prospective users?
I really wanted to say, “What the hell are we trying to accomplish here?” So I pushed back a bit, and then I found out the true reason they wanted to run the study; It was part of their yearly review goals’ to have UXR run X amount of…
