If you're just starting to venture into the world of user research (UX Research), you've probably wondered how you get there or, perhaps, how UX Research finds you. Clearly, you're not born a UX Researcher; you transform into a researcher as you make certain decisions in your career, academic life, and professional journey in general.
As I mentioned on my introduction page, I am a "specialized generalist." Over the past 18 years, I've spent approximately 90% of my time on digital projects, addressing various business problems from an interdisciplinary perspective. The remaining 10% was a mix of more traditional marketing and international trade (including market research). Of those 18 years, I've done UX Research for 14.
Broadly speaking, my journey was as follows:
- Undergraduate studies in business administration in Canada. I pursued a custom major, primarily consisting of business courses (a bit of everything in the common core: micro and macroeconomics, accounting, finance, HR), marketing, international trade, information systems, and e-commerce.
- 18 years of digital projects: I worked from my second year of university onwards.
- A mix of years in the corporate world and consulting.
- Master's in Advanced Design (MADA).
- Currently a PhD candidate in Engineering with a specialization in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).
I've been working in UX since 2006, when, in fact, we didn't even talk about UX, UX Research, or UX Researcher as such. At that time, I lived in Canada.
Before that, I went through marketing and market research. I got into it because I was always interested in the web world, and one day, I was given the opportunity to lead the redesign of a corporate website. Afterward, I felt I had to truly dedicate myself to digital to learn and make the web a better place. Therefore, I resigned and went to work as an e-commerce manager for a hotel group, also in Canada. There, I was in charge of 7 websites: a corporate portal, 5 booking sites, and an e-commerce store.
I arrived at that job with the mission of increasing e-commerce sales, so in the first few weeks, I dedicated myself to analyzing why we weren't selling more. Reviewing the metrics and conducting an interface inspection, I realized that the e-commerce navigation was unclear, and there was significant shopping cart abandonment. This happened because two brands coexisted on the site, and switching from one brand to another created the perception that you were changing sites.
The complex part was convincing senior management that we needed to change the navigation and, incidentally, fix other interface problems we had. To persuade them, I first asked them to let me test, and I went to two Canadian cities to conduct in-person tests with customers. That's how I did my first user test in 2008 and the first expert usability inspection or evaluation that same year. That's also when I became a unicorn (a term that didn't exist back then, but today is synonymous with a person with very varied knowledge and skills within a professional field).
I worked in-house in the corporate world. Between 2011 and 2012, while at Movistar, I participated in a project to simplify the movistar.cl website. I primarily focused on the site's information architecture, SEO, and sales funnel optimization, which generated incredible results in lead generation and conversion increase.
I continued for a while in the corporate world in the financial industry and finally became independent in 2014, founding a startup, UsabilityChefs, which was born from an idea I had during my master's in advanced design. The goal of that venture was to enable remote testing and evaluation of interfaces. It was basically a platform with a set of tools for professionals in charge of digital interface experience. That initial project evolved; we never left the application's beta, and the business model transformed into a consultancy.
From the consultancy, I had the opportunity to support companies of all sizes, mainly medium and large, some startups, and SMEs. And, honestly, every day, UX became a component of a working methodology aimed at designing memorable experiences with brands in an omnichannel context and less focused on a single interface.
The natural evolution of this was towards service design and innovation. Service design came naturally to me because I had led digital projects with cross-functional implementation for companies and had also led large teams. Furthermore, research is fundamental in service design, which is also something that comes naturally to me. Consequently, today I find it a bit complex to define myself solely as a UX Researcher because I usually add value from an interdisciplinary perspective, with a strategic and tactical view.
Some pillars that I consider fundamental for any professional who wants to dedicate themselves to UX Research are:
I am an eternal student, and my best self-gift or present is books. In turn, I have a great curiosity to understand the "why," "how," and "what for" of things. Over time, I have developed a good capacity for observation that makes me notice details in people's behavior, interactions, and human relationships. At the risk of sounding cliché, I would say that curiosity must be complemented by the ability to empathize.
To be a UX Researcher in an increasingly complex world, it is essential to have a systemic vision, which means seeking to understand the relationships between the parts of a system and looking at people's and companies' problems from a broad perspective. For a client, this can mean going beyond what was committed or the scope of a project because perhaps what you initially planned – for example, the design of a research study – is not enough to answer the study questions or explore a particular topic.
Regarding complexity and systemic vision, today's organizations need people with general knowledge across a wide spectrum of areas. As the following illustration shows (although it refers to UX design, it is very useful for understanding the UX world in general and, therefore, UX Research as well), disciplines such as human factors, ergonomics, information architecture, HCI, usability, copywriting, and marketing coexist and articulate to give life to this field.
This is what I call a professional and academic journey tailored to my liking, which has allowed me to forge a perhaps atypical UX Researcher profile with a background rooted in interdisciplinarity.
Do you like user research and want to enter the world of UX Research? Where do you come from, and what brings you to UX Research? If you are already an experienced researcher, how did you get there? Share your story in the comments of this post.
You can listen to part of this post on the Wunderman Thompson Peru podcast, where we talk a lot about user experience (UX) in e-commerce:
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