r/UXResearch

I am a senior researcher feeling stuck at my current job. It’s a full time remote job which is amazing. The pay is okay. The work life balance is currently not great and I feel like whenever I try new methods or try something new it is pushed aside. I work for a medium size company that is like many others, trying to use AI in new ways but is having a hard time figuring out what that looks like. There’s lot of pressure to show impact and there is a coworker I’m working with that I don’t really jive with.

I got a call from a recruiting agency that had a FAANG contract role on a really cool technology team that I think I’m well positioned for. It pays $60k more than what I’m making now. But it’s hybrid. It says it’s 3 days a week in the office and the office is about 2 hours away.

I have two kids (both in daycare).

$60k would be huge for us. With two kids in daycare and inflation, we can be more comfortable. Also, we want to move (we want to move to a place with better schools but HCOL).

For those in FAANG companies how strict is your RTO policy? I contracted at a FAANG a couple years ago and when they asked for people to RTO my manager was also remote and he said he would not ask any team member to go into the office. Also I learned so much there - I don’t feel like I’m learning as much where I am.

Also, is $60k worth leaving a full time remote job? It would be about a 2 hour drive one way. I think I would try to reduce it down to 2 days and get there early and come home early to avoid traffic (of use some public transportation part of the way to work while commuting).

I’m currently a Senior UXR at a Fortune 500. I’m mixed methods on paper and have a social and data science background. I’m comfortable with R and Python and I can survive in SQL. I don’t like doing survey research (sorry if I offend the survey methodologists here!). I can do it just fine, but in comparison to qual research, I find it harder to manage expectations. We don’t have access to a survey panel so getting a sufficient sample size is tough and “directional” insights are not enough. Sure, I can interview 10 people and feel confident in those insights. I can’t say the same for a quick survey. I just find survey research to be risky given all the constraints of my role.

Are there quant UXRs that don’t do survey work? For survey UXRs, how do you push back on survey requests that you know would yield bad insights? I’ve been interested in behavioral log analyses but I don’t hear UXRs talking about it.

Like why are you wasting my time??? I had 6 rounds of interviews and was supposed to have a “second” final round interview tomorrow. I’m done with UXR after this I’m just convinced the jobs aren’t there anymore.

I’m just bidding my time until my net worth is high enough to leave tech. I’m curious though, if you’ve left tech, what are you doing now and are you enjoying it?

Working on some research around how people prepare for doctor appointments and I didn’t expect “memory reconstruction” to become such a recurring theme.

A lot of people technically have the information already. But it’s spread across apps, messages, notes, test results, calendars, photos, etc.

Then before an appointment they try to mentally rebuild:
- timeline of symptoms
- what changed
- what helped
- what questions they had
- what previous doctors recommended

People describe it almost like trying to study for an exam using scattered notes.

Has anyone here worked on products where the main UX problem was helping users reconstruct context/history rather than just store information?

Would love recommendations for papers/case studies too if anything comes to mind, as well as your personal frustrations and solutions

I’m looking for recommendations for a career coach who understands the job of a uxr in a big company. Specifically, I’m looking for someone who can help me audit my strengths and refine my executive presence to better position myself for Senior or Lead UXR roles.

Edit: The coach doesn't have to be a researcher. I need someone whose approach is focused on elevating strengths and not fixing flaws, which is what a lot of the coaches out there promote.

Has anyone thought about creating an MCP for ux research?

I've been in the Google interview pipeline for a Senior UXR role for half a year now, and the level of recruiter incompetence/sabotage is reaching a breaking point. I suspect I’m being kept on a bench just to keep a recruiter’s pipeline looking healthy.

​The Timeline:

​November: Applied to an Android Auto team.

​December: Recruiter reaches out. I schedule an intro call. He no-shows. Reschedule.

​January: Finally get the intro call. Then ghosted for a month, with 3 follow ups.

​February: Recruiter finally resurfaces to say the original role I applied for is closed. She knew this since a few days following but didn't tell me. He says he has a "Android for Cars" team instead.

​March: I do the full loop. It goes great. Recruiter tells me the feedback is very positive across the board, he has to get the feedback written then submit. 3 weeks pass, he stops responding to my emails generally.

​April: I follow up with candidate support. He finally says the team decided not to hire anyone a few weeks ago, and he'll find me a new team.

​May (Now): Same pattern as before, him finding me a team means 0 communication but I'm still sending the open recs that I fit to him. No response.

That's the end of fact and the rest is speculation but the more I thought, the more odd I thought it was that he found another team in the same organization the first time, and that he doesn't respond to me sending him roles that are the exact same as what I interviewed for in different parts of the organization. I believe he's keeping me on the shelf for the next time a role pops up in his part of the organization so that he can get credit for the placement, but that is costing me thousands every single week.

I’m going to be trying to bypass him entirely and cold-email hiring managers in other orgs to tell them I’m "ready to match" and have already interviewed.

I’m interested in interfaces that technically worked, but created a weird gap between “being able to use it” and actually understanding it.

Bonus points if it involved documents, forms, ID verification, uploads, submissions, permissions, etc.

As the title mentions: after a lengthy selection process for a Senior UXR role, I got rejected at the last step, and one of the reasons quoted was a lack of quantitative skills.

Admittedly, my background is heavily qualitative: usability testing, interviews, synthesis, journey mapping, strategic recommendations, etc. I’ve worked a bit with surveys and some analytics tools, but quant hasn’t been the core of my roles so far.

I’m trying to understand how to realistically bridge this gap in my profile without completely pivoting careers.

For those of you who successfully became more “mixed methods” or quant-oriented:

• Are there specific tools/methods/courses/projects you’d recommend?
• How deep into statistics/data analysis do companies usually expect you to go?

At the moment, I'm following a UX Data Analysis course on EDx and finding it quite helpful. So far it seems that my knowledge of descriptive statistics is solid, but I'm lacking the inferential aspect. I'm now getting familiar with the concepts of p-value, t-tests etc. I'm also wondering if you use those concepts a lot in your daily work?

Any feedback will be greatly appreciated 😊

Hi there! I come from a biology background and have been wondering for a while now if I should pursue UX research.

I have some transferrable skills (scientific research, study design and testing, data interpretation, statistical analysis) but things like managing stakeholder needs or interviewing people are pretty foreign to me! The "social" part of social-science is what I'll really need to practice.

When I read about what UX researchers do, it seems like a really nice blend of my interests, which is what draws me to it. I think the psychology aspect is really neat - understanding how people interact with things and figuring out the whys and hows of their preferences/needs, identifying problem spots, coming up with solutions that address issues, working with data - all of that sounds appealing!

But on the other hand, I'm not a people person, nor do I have any experience navigating the corporate/business side of things, which I hear is a huge part of the job. My work has always been more of a "behind the scenes" type of thing. So I suppose I'm overall kind of conflicted. I wonder if maybe I'm glorifying and romanticizing UXR the same way I did biology?

I guess my question for everyone here is how did you know UXR was right for you? Do you feel the pros outweigh the cons? Did you eventually grow to enjoy the things you thought you'd hate, or vise versa?

Any answers would really help. Thank you!

I have interned at big tech 3 times across my PhD and now will joing a place where I interned. Here are things that helped me bag return internship offers and convert internships into full time offers:

1. Talk to everyone, put up meetings, grab lunch, grab ice cream whatever maximize every second you can with anyone. Build a core set of people who can vouch for you and write a testimonial for you in your final review.
2. Keep collecting evidence, present your work to leaders, managers, across teams and take every opportunity you get to showcase your work and collect evidence of appreciation, screenshots, emails etc. and include them in your final review.
3. Be innovative in how you go about your research, as an intern we have the opportunity to bring freshness in approach and perspective as long as its suited to answer your research goals. Try new methods, double down on your evidence through secondary research.
4. Package your findings in the most simple and amazing way. Here are my two personal favorites and I "like" to believe this helped me convert to full time: 1. Insight Reels: I created montage of people sharing their opinions, montage of usbaility issues to hammer the users pain points, joy points to my leaders/managers and team. 2. Comics: This is my favorite, and helps convey the entire story in a 2 rows of comic strips with nice relatable characters. Before my final week, I created a comic ook which walked through the entire consumer experience and painpoints for the product I was working on. And I left it on the table of my manager and stakeholders for them to read. I recieved great appreciation for it. Bottom Line: think creative, be fresh and execute with rigor.
5. If you are in big-tech or work with teams which are on the cutting edge of AI/LLMs do whatever it takes to be involved in conversations and contribute to studies. You will build solid experience and it should open up your horizions and expand your skill set.
6. While this might sound as "attempting to please", as an intern more often then not I am under constant pressure to execute and highlight I am not just "good" but to show I am "extraordinary". Constantly keep trying to think one step ahead, and try to answer questions your manager might need to answer to their manager. A mentor told me "ask your skip what work problem is NOT putting them to sleep, and consider yourself with an offer if you figure it out"

I have come across more and more date pickers that are not usable. Date pickers on mobile are where good UX goes to quietly suffer. You tap the little calendar icon and suddenly half your screen is a popup, the other half is the keyboard, and the actual date you’re trying to pick is hidden behind both.

Typing the date manually? The keyboard covers the input. Scrolling through years? Your thumb cramps before you reach 1995. Picking a date range? Pray. The “from” and “to” fields collapse, expand, and occasionally swap places for fun.

This is a perfect example of how something labeled an accessibility issue is one that affects everyone. What are some of your more frustrating UX experiences?

Like… sometimes the UI looks completely fine,
but one icon keeps feeling off no matter what you do.
You change the stroke.
Adjust spacing.
Try another metaphor.
Still weird.
And I’ve noticed something:
Most of the time, the issue isn’t even the icon itself.
It’s the meaning behind it.
Take the “share” icon for example.
Sometimes it means send.
Sometimes repost.
Sometimes export or upload.
Same icon.
Different actions.
we keep redesigning the symbol…
when the real problem is the action was never clear in the first place.
So
I think that’s why icons get so frustrating.
They don’t usually fail visually.
They fail because users interpret them differently.
Have you ever had an icon that looked “correct” visually…
but still didn’t feel right in the UI?

I’ve been a UXR for ~ 10y and just got an offer from my old company to return as a UX-focused product manager.

I’d be responsible for generative research, product strategy/roadmap, and work with UX on designs and evaluative testing etc. That company hasn’t fully jumped off the AI cliff yet so (except for research) PMs aren’t yet pressured to do end to end work. The execs aren’t super crazy about chasing metrics at the expense of the UX. The product is very interesting to me, and I know the hiring manager pretty well. Commute would be much shorter. I think it’s a great fit for the most part.

The problem is that they’re struggling to meet my requested compensation. I countered their initial offer and don’t have final numbers yet but I was warned I’ll probably have to take a loss of $5k-$20k/year. And that’s just year 1. My current employer has better raises and bonuses, better 401k options and other quality of life perks. The loss would compound over time, assuming my current employer didn’t decide to lay us all off.

Anyway, if you thought you’d like the job better, would you be willing to lose money on it?

Hi everyone, I'm an M.A. Clinical Psychology student trying to figure out if UX research is a viable path for me and how to actually break into it.

A bit about my background I have experience in qualitative and quantitative research, have co-authored papers, and have done internships involving data and behavioral analysis ( psychology domain)

So the research side feels natural, but I have zero design background.

A few things I'm genuinely confused about and would love honest answers on:

1. How is the UX research job market in India right now? I've been told junior roles are basically frozen and most require 2-3 years of experience. Is that accurate, or am I looking in the wrong places?
2. Does a psychology background actually help here, or is it irrelevant without design skills? I keep seeing job posts that expect both research AND UI design, which feels like a lot.
3. Consumer insights vs UX research someone suggested consumer insights might be a smarter entry point for someone like me. Would love to hear from people who've done either or both.
4. Where do people actually find UX research internships in India? I'm only finding full-time roles with experience requirements everywhere I look.

Thanks in advance!

Hello, UXRs.

I have a questions on user recruitment for user testing. Not sure if it is the right place, but..!

I am myself more of a developer in our little startup, but lately we decided to run UX research - and I am now in charge of it. I was in HCI lab in university, but running tests in university greenhouse conditions with some XR prototypes which are fancy and cool but are not supposed to convert users and bring money is a totally another thing.

So we want to understand what puts users off at the funnel final stage - and decided to go with usability test with thinking aloud. The problem is that I am not sure where to recruit users - and we want a very specific segment (people who need a product like this). I tried some of the services like Userbrain - of course, there is a screener question, but it is still not clear whether the people really do need a product like ours - and of course they wont't buy (and won't even consider buying) a product during the session. So I was thinking of offering a discount coupon for first month of our service as an incentive for running a user study - and looking for participants interested enough in subreddits/linkedin/threads etc. That's the best thing I could think about - may be you can kindly suggest any other ideas?

Thanks in advance!

I’m a junior UXR in attendance until Thursday. If anyone is also here for the conference in San Francisco I would love to meet people in the field. I’m a team of one at a startup so my brain is in full on sponge mode. We could exchange together codes or coordinate for one of the meetups after the main talks. Cheers

I'm still young and studying and UX Research seems like my style so can anyone tell me the job security and pay?