What Exactly Do You Do?
As a researcher, I spend a lot of time with questions: asking them, answering them, scoping them, and managing them. I’ve become fond of a few questions that I get over and over again:
You’re a psychologist, right?
My background and training is in many different areas of psychology. I majored in psychology in college, got an MA in clinical counseling, and finished my PhD in cognitive neuroscience. That technically means I am a research psychologist. My work at Verizon Connect centers around User Experience (UX) Research, and as an Experience Team Research manager, psychology continues to be the focus of my work.
Do you psychoanalyze people all the time?
People generally assume that anyone who works in psychology is a shrink, and shrinks never stop shrinking. However, there are so many careers in psychology! You can be a clinical psychologist, who is close to what you may already think of when you think of psychologists. These professionals spend time with clients and patients to help them manage their mental health. You can be a school psychologist, who is someone who focuses on the well-being of young people within their school and family lives. You can be a forensic psychologist, who is someone who advocates for people’s mental health in legal situations and settings. You can also be what I chose to become: a research psychologist. These professionals learn the ins and outs of specific fields within psychology (e.g., cognitive psych, social psych, health psych, neuroscience, industrial/organizational psych) and uncover experimental findings that enhance foundational knowledge.
Are you psychoanalyzing me right now?
Do you feel like I’m psychoanalyzing you?
But since my move into UX, and my more recent move into a management role, the biggest question I continue to get is:
WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU DO?
The overwhelming majority of psychology professionals have probably been asked this at one point, and I'd be willing to bet that most researchers in all other fields have been asked this as well. This question is a double-edged sword. It's a great question because it allows me to talk about my role, our awesome team, and the work we get to do. It's also a frustrating question because no matter how many times try to answer it, I never feel like I am successful. So, let’s break down what my responsibilities are as a UX Researcher and a UX Research Manager, and how psychology is at the root of it all.
UX Research
Most of the UX research articles you'll find are about one type of UX research: usability testing. This is the process of testing whether products are easy to use, navigate, and understand. Some common methods of usability research include prototype testing, which is the process of giving an early version of the solution to a user and asking questions about how well it meets the user's needs. Another example is A/B testing, which is the process of comparing two versions of a solution on a set of user metrics, like time spent using the solution, or level of satisfaction with the solution. Usability research is incredibly valuable for companies looking for feedback for solutions that already exist. Product and development teams need a steady stream of feedback to ensure that the solutions they build are getting better and better at meeting user needs, increasing success and revenue. They also need to be able to catch when problems arise, like when user flows are overly complicated, or when user actions cannot be completed.
However, there is an entire world of research that must be done to advocate for our users and customers. So far, the best summary of all the different types of user research is the Research Funnel. Here, we start to map research broader than the tactical and operational sides that help ensure we deliver to our users. We start to see exploratory research take place in order to identify new trends, new environments, and new users for our products. One area for us at the moment is 5G. This new technology will impact how all of our solutions work together to solve problems for our users. We need “top-of-the-funnel” research to be able to explore these spaces and identify what users will need.
This is why having a subject matter expert in psychology is vital to any research team. We must match our solutions as closely as possible to how users already think and act. We need to match our users’ mental models. Products, designs, and experiences are lauded for being intuitive, seamless, and easy-to-use. Ironically, the things that are heralded as being the most innovative are the things that we’ve already optimized ourselves, as humans.
Take the personalization of technology, for instance. We easily speak to one another as humans with a shared style of communication. We address each other by name, we have a structured syntax, and we have social norms that vary by culture and context that set expectations on how to speak and respond. As humans, we can instantly tell when there are mismatched vs. matched responses if the person we’re speaking to violates those rules of engagement. This is extremely difficult to replicate for user experiences with technology. So many AI and robotics experiences still feel clunky or unnatural. This is because we, as humans, have already optimized these process with each other. Therefore, we must understand human nature and development to inform what we build.
We must also understand how our interactions with technology reflect our human nature. Digg writer Aaron Paul Calvin asks, Can Amazon’s Alexa Be Your Friend?, and Slate writer Rachel Withers posits that how you treat your digital assistant says a lot about the way you treat people. There is a rising, general awareness of how our technology is influenced by our biases. To learn about how racial and gender bias have become prevalent issues in machine learning and AI, look to this Google video for a great overview, as well as this Towards Data Science article by Jiaconda on Medium, this Time article by Joy Buolamwini, and this Wired article by Yael Eisenstat. It is increasingly important for us as researchers to intertwine what we’ve observed in our relationships to technology with what we’ve learned about our relationships with each other. This is how we start to create not just better user experiences with our products, but better human experiences overall.
UX Research Management
Recently, I transitioned into a managerial role. One of the biggest changes to my work has been that I no longer devote the bulk of my time to doing the actual research (which I miss!). Most of my time is spent on helping our research team get the resources that they need to be able to do their work. This means that I must align with our leaders to understand what the research goals, asks, and projects are. This also means that I must align with our project stakeholders to make sure that our researchers (and the entire project team) are on the same page about the research activities and deliverables that will inform their work. This also means that I must align with our company-wide stakeholders to help share useful information that can be leveraged across all products and lines of business.
Most importantly, this means that I must think ahead about the future of our research team, anticipating and planning for the kinds of research our company needs as we move forward, and how our team wants to grow and evolve to ensure that we’re doing our best work. We constantly talk about career development plans, ways to share feedback with leadership, external ways to share and add to the UX and research discourse (shameless plug for our Verizon Connect Research Medium!), and what it actually means to be a research team. It takes a lot of planning, advocacy, and discussion to move such a big vision forward, and it’s exciting to get to work in a place where we have a voice in shaping that direction!
Though I often get asked about my years of experience in industry, I strongly advocate that a background in academia is incredibly helpful for this role. Prior to my time with Verizon Connect, I officially taught students in some capacity or another for a total of 7 years. I lean on the tactics that I learned through those experiences to help me structure my work. Take alignment, for example. Any instructor worth their salt knows that there’s no way you’re going to get a group of people to achieve common goals without first defining what those goals are and giving clear instruction for each step of work necessary to achieve those goals. Instructors also know that they must take into consideration the different points of view that everyone brings to the table. Alignment with stakeholders requires clear explanation and discussion, guided by best practices that are fundamental to getting the kinds of insights that are needed to make decisions. Tactical discussions also revolve around knowing what our stakeholders’ primary goals are so that we can speak to each of those goals with our work. Finally, staying consistent in the messaging is absolutely required; otherwise, work starts to spiral out of scope and out of control. Our team is sure to come to the table with this level of planning from a research perspective, with all of our efforts. This kind of structure takes additional effort to plan and execute, which is something that instructors also face — the jobs behind the actual job. And on that note…
My “Actual” Job
I studied psychology because I wanted to help people. Funnily enough, even though I am a research psychologist, it is not necessarily my PhD training that I use most often when I am doing my “actual” job. My clinical counseling training is what is truly propelling me forward in this role. See, my “actual” job is crucial in the little, often overlooked, supportive role kind of moments: the slight tweaks to how we phrase our sentences as we communicate our research, the organization that it takes to get alignment, the momentary pauses when things get frustrating and difficult, the reassuring looks when we’re having fierce conversations, and the sigh of relief when a project is handed off smoothly. It makes sense that my counseling skill set is most applicable to what I do daily, because what I do daily is help the people who aim to help you as the user. It requires an incredible amount of capacity to hold this emotional, soft skills labor on top of everything else we need to do, and the real experts at managing this capacity are people trained in therapeutic practices.
Looking Forward
It has been an amazing journey so far, and I certainly have more to learn. Our teams and co-workers have amazing wisdom and knowledge to share, and it’s inspiring to see us all come together as a cross-functional team to achieve goals to make our users’ experiences just that much better. I hope to share even more from my experience to continue our trend of sharing early, sharing often, and sharing what we’ve learned, especially through our #ShareAllSaturdays!