From the course: UX Insights Weekly

What does a user researcher do?

From the course: UX Insights Weekly

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What does a user researcher do?

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- [Instructor] User research brings the voice of a user to a product development team. Because the people who develop software have different levels of technological expertise and different life experiences than the people who use software, they can often make bad assumptions about what users need and want in order to get their tasks done. That's true for everything from office productivity software through to apps and games. User researchers help development team members understand these differences by watching users work. Often, they'll visit users in their own environment to get an in-depth view of the tasks. Sometimes they'll bring people into the development team's offices to make it easier to control the environment. User researchers often have a background in psychology, sociology, anthropology or other human research areas. They know how to observe and interact with participants without biasing the outcome. They also know how to analyze this observation data and extract insights from it. Along with direct observation and interviews, user researchers will sometimes run surveys, either in-person or online. And will make use of web metrics and analytics data to help explain user behaviors. Once a product is developed enough to start using, user researchers will run usability studies to see which parts of the product work the way users expect it to, and which cause problems. They'll then feed this information back to the team and use their knowledge of how people interact with software to suggest ways to fix the issues. These days, pretty much any development team can create a product. What differentiates good products from bad ones is how well the product supports user's needs and how good they feel using it. By finding out what those needs are very early in the process, before development has even started, user researchers can help define the pain points that the software should fix so that it ends up being delightful to use. User researchers will often take team members on site visits to see issues for themselves. They'll bring this data back to the team and use it as the basis for design thinking exercises that define what the product should do and how it should work. They'll invite the team to watch usability sessions and then work with the team to design solutions for the problems that the usability testing found. So along with the observation and analysis skills, user researchers also need to be good at working with all sorts of team members, from product managers to developers. And at bringing those people together to focus on what really matters, the user experience of the product they're creating. If you want to learn more about user research, check out these two courses. UX Foundations: Usability Testing goes into the details of how user researchers test products. Making UX happen as a team helps you understand more about the role that user researchers play in bringing an understanding of user needs to the development process.

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