5 UX Researcher beginner mistakes and how to overcome them
It does not matter what people say, everybody makes mistakes. Although when you are just starting out in a new field of study, these are more obvious. In this post we will analyze the five most common mistakes of the beginner UX Researcher profile. And we will also give some suggestions about how to overcome them.
Anybody who is initiating their way in the field will make mistakes, essentially due to lack of experience. In this article we will see some of these mistakes and how to get around them. That being said, applying UX methodologies and techniques will also help you fix those mistakes in the future and improve iteratively.
Consider your learning process as the iteration development of a product to acquire new abilities and boost the ones that you already have.
Mistake number 1: let yourself go by the authority bias
As an inexperienced person, you may stumble upon this mistake for a while, but the sooner you realize that people with more experience than you are not always right, the better. Furthermore, you can adapt the same advice we gave to deal with dominant individuals.
UX research is a reflective environment, where there are many points of view and, most importantly, data that may enable an already made decision to be changed. Or take a step back.
For instance: during a product meeting one characteristic is removed due to maintenance problems and high costs of it. The decision was made because it is used by less than 5% of active subscriptions. Logic indicates that this is the right decision.
But interestingly your first task was the evaluation of this characteristic and you have determined that it is what is known as a deal breaker, something that for those subscriptions means choosing your product instead of the competitor’s, even using it with enthusiasm and actively recommending it, also knowing that your main competitor has just started to offer it.
Standing for your obtained conclusions during research and relying on data is one of the first lessons you need to learn. Not only so you can place yourself next to the user, but also because you manage to display the real value that research has during the decision making process.
In this matter, you could use the next piece of advice:
- Asking why: Be comfortable with always asking the logic behind the decisions that are being taken, since it will help you in your learning process, but it will also allow you to think about the actual reasons that have led to the final decisions and find out if they were appropriately made.
- Forge alliances: Getting acquainted with your colleagues will allow you to know who you can lean on when the outcome of your research needs authority. Take into account that you have a fresh-look, with no apparent bias, so you can provide a different point of view that may help improve research.
Mistake number 2: Not planifying appropriately the analyzing time
This is one of the biggest mistakes that can be made, especially if you completely exclude the analysis phase during the research process (you should never do that). Still, the most common mistake is underestimating the analysis duration.
Analyzing data may require more time than collecting information for the research. You need to relate all data between itself so you can draw conclusions or, otherwise, research will fail.
Think about how you may have taken many notes that you will need to classify and even discard in some cases due to their lesser value. In this sense you have two options:
- Hold onto the study objectives: It is true that on many occasions we obtain data during the research that goes deeper than the case of our study and can even lead to new hypotheses. Even if you take notes of this, it may not have value for your current analysis, so you will have to get rid of them (although saving them for the future).
- Review and clean up your notes regularly: If the task is going to be developed during the course of a few days, it may be useful to take advantage of the space between sessions to inspect your notes and classify information, at least arranging the one that could be useful from the one that is not. This may help you later focus only on what you really need to.
In this video you can listen to some advice regarding the role of the notetaker (in Spanish):
Mistake number 3: Focusing exclusively on your team and work
Well, this can obviously happen, given that you have acquired some knowledge that you want to apply at the drop of a hat. But on many occasions a new approach is needed, a new technique, learning or, simply, satisfying curiosity or even taking part in a competitor’s benchmarking to improve.
To make this happen, you better be aware of everything that is happening around the world, new trends, what is being talked about more or just so you can evade from your work for some time or even develop some soft skill that you may have lying around.
However, you don’t need to get outside from your company if you don’t want to. Talking to people in other teams may help you forge alliances, just as we commented earlier, and even identify possible opportunities. What is our advice?
Establishing links with Customer Support or Sales may help you identify topics to research about or endorse results from your research.
Furthermore, actively sharing information and reports will help you access very relevant information for your research that can also be useful to help understand the product and the user needs, thus speeding up all the processes.
Mistake number 4: Work only on what has been assigned to you
One of the main abilities that are needed to develop any research job is curiosity. This quality pushes us to exceed the project’s scope (see error number two), even if you are focused only on the assigned tasks, you can miss the target.
The reason why you should not abide just to your assigned tasks is because you may be able to help DesignOps validate new hypotheses or ease ResearchOps the addition of new tasks to the output queue at some point. That means, make proposals for new research projects so you can keep activity with stakeholders and all the other team members.
As iteration is a continuous improvement, you can take advantage of it to make propositions based in:
- The roadmap and the backlog: Check the pointed priorities and add to them, especially when the development of some functionality may imply additional research.
- Check the objectives: Instead of making propositions based only on characteristics, you can make propositions subject to objectives and needs that have been detected, hence reducing general friction of the product.
Mistake number 5: Not investing in yourself
Can you speak of continuous improvement if you have been doing the same job with the same techniques and methodologies for two decades? There are areas where this is possible, but product design and user experience are not in this category.
That is why, further than keeping alive the flame of curiosity, you must train yourself, learn new techniques, enhance the ones you already know and think that you are like a product, where continuous improvement can always be achieved.
Advanced Research Specialization Program (classes are in Spanish).
In this sense, further than accessing training, contribute with a more holistic approach, a greater general focus. For that, these last two pieces of advice may help you.
- Specialize: Get in a field and dive into it from most general to most specific, but making relations with all the new knowledge you acquire, that will help you improve your investigation conclusions and know which methodologic and technical approach apply.
- Use multiple sources of information: Do not bind yourself to a reduced number of spaces to learn in (just as this blog), you should add others. You can learn new points of view or even new techniques that are arising.
If you want a list of sources, you can read this article by Daniel Torres Burriel (in Spanish) on Platzi’s blog with a collection of blogs of common read on the Studio.
Think that nobody, not even the person with the most experience, is free of mistakes. That is why it is important to keep up to date, develop knowledge and have a critical vision of the environment.
This article is a translation of the following one published on our corporate website:
