The 6 biggest changes going from grad school to UX research, and how to prepare
Recognize potential challenges to ease your transition
What made you successful in graduate school won’t necessarily make you successful as a UX researcher.
The direct transferability of academic research skills to UX research skills has been badly oversold. It doesn’t happen automatically. Instead, it takes work to see the right connections between two similar, but different, domains, and to ignore the false cognates that might set us back.
To succeed, you will need to learn to think and speak in the language of a new domain. You can begin preparing for that transition in these 6 key areas:
- Methods
- Analyses
- Speed
- Ethics
- Peer Review
- Relationships and Impact
You’ll learn new methods and repurpose old ones.
Coming from a closely related academic discipline, I was surprised to learn that for many of the new methods I was expected to use, I was starting close to zero.
Many of us relied heavily on quantitative methods in our graduate research, but have had to learn and master qualitative ones on the job. You may also find that some methods you learned about go by a different name in the field, or have specific use cases. For example, A/B testing is a kind of between-subjects experimental design used for testing the efficacy of alternative designs.
Make the shift: Get a reputable methods book to introduce yourself to our terms of art. Find opportunities to practice unfamiliar ones.
You’ll communicate analyses and results differently.
You won’t be sharing p values or post-hoc tests. Beyond perhaps other researchers on your team, no one you work with will care.
What they want to know is whether the differences you see are meaningful enough to act upon. Do your results represent a big enough risk or opportunity for the business? That can mean statistical significance, but you’ll have to make the call when it’s close, even if you lack the sample size or power.
Make the shift: Compare the style and content of familiar academic reports and example UXR reports available online or from your target organization.
The pace can be invigorating… or daunting.
Compared with academic projects, UX research happen lightning fast.
You’ll have greater resources on hand and fewer bureaucratic obstacles for things that slow things down in grad school, like participant recruitment. But there will also be organizational pressure and deadlines to get results in time for key decisions. You’ll have to challenge yourself, or even, at times, make some compromises, to keep up.
Make the shift: Take on an extracurricular UXR project, and make it realistic by setting a deadline. Better yet, work with a real stakeholder for pro bono work.
You and your team are responsible for ethical research.
For better or worse, you won’t have an IRB to fall back on.
Instead, you’ll need to think deeply about participants’ rights and well-being, their risks and benefits, and how you’ll protect their privacy. More than likely, your organization will have a legal team to consult if needed. But you’ll want to get ahead of thorny situations and take every precaution to conduct ethical research.
Make the shift: Draft research plans for common invasive methods, like authenticated experience research. Consider how you’ll respect participants’ rights and address key research questions.
Peer review is no longer required.
The good news: no more dealing with abuse from anonymous reviewer 3.
The bad news: useful feedback can be challenging to get. Virtually every report will benefit from having a second set of eyes. Unfortunately, you may be the only researcher on your team, or the other researchers will be tied up with their own work.
Make the shift: Write a template email for requesting peer review, making it as specific and streamlined as possible for folks to help you. Test it out with a case study if you have one to solicit real feedback.
Conducting good research is only half of the job.
No journal will give your work the stamp of approval.
For your research to have an impact, a big part of your role will be strengthening relationships and getting it in front of the right people. This means getting to know what motivates people and how they collaborate best. You’ll also have to put yourself out there and get on people’s radar.
Make the shift: learn about your target organization’s structure, history, and goals, identifying the key players and opportunities to share findings.
Prepare yourself now for these mindset shifts.
Don’t assume that mastering a new domain will happen effortlessly. Before you get too far into your first role, you can begin the process of transferring academic skills to industry research in these key areas:
- Read methods books to learn new UXR terms and applications.
- Compare academic and UXR reports for style and content.
- Give your next project tight deadlines to simulate industry speed.
- Think through ethical approaches to challenging research methods.
- Ask a busy colleague for feedback on a case study.
- Study your target organization for clues about how to have impact there.
Think of yourself as someone with a lot to offer and a lot to learn. Embrace the challenge. You’ll not only pick things up more quickly, but you’ll also work more effectively as a UX researcher.
Looking for more career direction? Some other articles I’ve written:
- Becoming a UX researcher out of grad school? Your advantages and disadvantages. Learn how to position yourself as a grad.
- 3 reasons grad school won’t count as UXR work experience (and what you can do). How to find companies that value advanced degrees.
- Should you have UX research portfolio? I surveyed the field and give some recommendations.
Thanks to Thomas Stokes for reviewing drafts of this article. If you’ve found this article useful, sign up for Depth by Drill Bit Labs, a free bimonthly newsletter on UX research and digital strategy.
