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What I’ve learned in my first year as a UX researcher
I am an industrial engineer, turned software developer, turned UX Researcher. I wrote about my journey here.
I am Mariana Tek’s first and only UX Researcher and it has been quite the whirlwind of emotions and tons of learning.
I have learned a lot in my first year and hopefully, some of it helps someone else in their first (or any) year.
1. Get organized first
I’ve spent the better half of this year drowning in Google Docs. I was doing so much research, but it all just sat on my computer, in half-grouped folders. I organized and re-organized these folders constantly. I used Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Drive. I tried to share my work with others, but it took too much understanding of how my brain works for anyone else to make sense of it all.
Mid-way through the year, I committed to being organized. And I documented how I was organizing things so that it wasn’t all in my head. This just proved how disorganized it really was. The cognitive load I was placing on myself, and others, was enormous. I became stressed just thinking about how I’d begin to develop an organization strategy that would scale with our company. My goal when starting any project is to create something that can outlive my time on it; the same concept applied here.
Eventually, I figured it out. I worked with my co-workers and found a system that worked for everyone, not just me. I’ll share my system in a later post, but a quick list of tools I use to be organized are: Google Drive & Calendar, Airtable, EnjoyHQ, Mixmax, Zapier, & Notion.
I encourage everyone to find a system as early as possible. It takes a lot of energy to be constantly disorganized while trying to also perform research.
2. When finding participants, use your resources
I spend a lot of time thinking about recruitment. We have two customer bases that require different types of recruitment…
