There is no prescribed career path for user research. It’s about mindset as much as experience or qualifications. But you might meet obstacles on the way.
Just imagine a time machine taking you to the very beginning of your professional career journey. Is it, by any chance, a bright day in May, right after your A level exams?
Spring makes everything flourish, including the many ideas you have about what to do in life. What type of a career did you have in mind? What were your goals?
Maybe you were one of those lucky people who knew exactly what you wanted to do with your life. Maybe you wanted to be a user researcher right from the start.
Or perhaps you were more like me, with a general interest in how and why things work but no idea which career that might lead to.
I was always interested in people, in their behaviour, the language they use, the contradictions in their attitudes versus their behaviour…
I always had a never-ending cascade of questions that started with “Why…?” But it took me some time to work out that user research was where I could ask questions for a living.
The beautiful thing is that it doesn’t really matter where we had started, or the route we took to get here.
The user research team at SPARCK comes from various professions, such as psychology, management, design, marketing, and computer science. They’ve got qualifications in arts, science, clinical practice, engineering, and all sorts of other subjects.
User research speaks to this kind of investigative, attentive and curious mind, and gives them chance to finding better solutions to complex problems. That’s what we have in common.
But we should also embrace our differences, and the broad range of our experience and interests. This is what helps us fit with one project, or another, and complement each other’s skills.
Perfectionism is your nemesis
Once upon a time, I was struggling to finalise a project.
I had every piece of the puzzle but couldn’t put them all together, and it kept getting worse and more complicated.
Fortunately, I had a mentor who said to me something along these lines:
“Don’t go spiralling too deep with this. You have everything you need, right there. Switch the focus from issues to a solution. It doesn’t have to be perfect – it just needs to exist. Find solutions, which are ‘good enough’ and we’ll develop it from there.”
At the time, this was life-changing advice.
As researchers, we are prone to be alert to tiniest details. We can investigate a problem to death with a natural and praiseworthy desire to have everything fully researched, finely polished and triple checked.
The problem is, it’s so easy to tip over from being rigorous and careful (good) to perfectionism (bad) which can cause you to get stuck.
I am not advising anyone to work carelessly. Our job as researcher is to challenge the attitude of ‘just do it’ and to introduce friction, checks and balances to the process.
But we do sometimes need to take the pressure off ourselves. How good is good enough? At what point does it become more productive to ship something that can be tested in the real world?
Perfectionism, research indicates, often holds hands with another friend.
Recently I sat on the panel of UX researchers with varying degrees of experience. The interesting thing was that even those who’d been working in UR for years, or even decades, still suffered from impostor syndrome.
Impostor syndrome
It has many names: impostor phenomenon, fraud syndrome, perceived fraudulence, or impostor experience.
It is loosely defined as doubting your abilities paired with persistent internal feeling of being exposed as a ‘fraud’.
This may be accompanied by feelings “of having ended up in esteemed roles not because of merits or achievement but because of some oversight on the part of important gatekeepers, or due to sheer luck” (Feenstra et al, 2020).
The term itself was first used in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes to described a tendency observed in high-achieving women. More recent reviews, however, suggest it is experienced equally by both women and men.
From graduates to Hollywood to CEOs in tech, 7 in 10 people experience the impostor feeling at some point of their life. And despite objective evidence of their achievements, these people express difficulty in acknowledging them as true or real.
While the long line of research into impostor syndrome generally considers it in a personal, individual context, we are social creatures. We live, work and function in complex socioeconomic, institutional, and environmental settings.
Here, we find endless scenarios which might trigger self-consciousness, self-doubt, and finally, make us feel like fakes.
Literature provides many examples, such as:
- a role with more ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ traits
- a group where we feel ‘different’ or fall into a certain stereotype
- a place in the hierarchy where we’re surrounded by people we perceive as expert
That’s why some specialists argue that we shouldn’t focus on impostor syndrome as a problem relating to an individual’s traits (a ‘syndrome’) but rather as a psychological reaction to dysfunctional circumstances.
Therefore, going back to my mentor’s advice, I’ll give you few ideas that can help counter impostor feelings.
- Confront yourself and reflect on your own achievement – you’ve probably accomplished more than you realise.
- There is no success without failure. It’s how we learn, and every dead end gets us closer to the solution.
- Find opportunities for growth, in work and outside – how can you feel happy and valued beyond your core professional role?
- Seek a mentor, colleague, or friend with whom you can share your feelings and doubts – or even a therapist if the feelings are serious and disruptive.
- Use the support available at your workplace, from formal to informal, and build yourself a network. Others probably feel just like you do.
- Be a driver in systemic and cultural change. How can you help others feel as if they belong and are valued?
You’re unique and that’s great
The most important thing to remember is that there’s no single correct path to a career in UX research.
Your unique experiences and journey make you stronger and give you strengths others might lack.
Embrace your unique qualities – including your worries and weaknesses – and use them to your advantage, and to deliver for users.
Additional reading
Bravata, D. M., Watts, S. A., Keefer, A. L., Madhusudhan, D. K., Taylor, K. T., Clark, D. M., Nelson, R. S., Cokley, K. O., & Hagg, H. K. (2020). Prevalence, Predictors, and Treatment of Impostor Syndrome: a Systematic Review. Journal of general internal medicine, 35(4), 1252–1275. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-019-05364-1
Feenstra, S., Begeny, C. T., Ryan, M. K., Rink, F. A., Stoker, J. I., & Jordan, J. (2020). Contextualizing the Impostor "Syndrome". Frontiers in psychology, 11, 575024. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.575024
Mullangi, S., & Jagsi, R. (2019). Imposter Syndrome: Treat the Cause, Not the Symptom. JAMA, 322(5), 403–404. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2019.9788
