UX is the way a person feels about using a product, system or service. User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership, but it also includes a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system. User experience is subjective in nature, because it is about an individual’s feelings and thoughts about the system.So then, what does a User Experience Researcher (also known as a User Researcher) do? According to this UX Career Guide...
User Researchers provide a deep understanding and insight of user behavior, needs and motivations. They offer feedback in all phases of the design process from project conception, to implementation, to development. They conduct user and task analyses to identify opportunities to improve user experience. And, they synthesize research findings into meaningful recommendations and actionable results.And why the heck do I want to do it?! I guess that brings us to a little bit about me. My background is in jury research/consulting. And that's a whole other crazy field that you probably have not heard of. Remember the movie "Runaway Jury"? Well that's basically my job minus the explosions, stalking, and killing. My current job and skills are totally applicable to User Research, I swear! In jury research, we do surveys, focus groups, interviews, synthesize data, etc. I also have a background in Psychology (a Masters in Social Psychology) so I'm down with qualitative and quantitative research methods. I just need to learn the lingo, methods specific to the field, and theories surrounding User Research. But, at the end of the day research is research and I do know research. I want to get into User Research for the following reasons:
- I love technology!
- I like studying people and the stuff they do and what they're thinking.
- I think it's awesome that by researching how people interact with tech, I can actually help to improve product design.
- I want free lunch (read: I want free tech company lunch).
I hope that this blog may eventually serve as a sort of "how-to." I'll talk about what I'm doing to teach myself about the field, what I'm learning, and how I'm going about gaining experience. Someday I'd like to be able to point to this blog and say "that's how I did it." If anyone stumbles upon this blog, please feel free to comment with advice, suggestions, or questions!
Until then, creating this blog is a first step and before I could even do that, I had to come up with the blog's name. I turned to CleverBot:
User: What should I name my blog? |
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