The Evolution of UX Research in a Turbulent Tech Market

okay so like Bill mentioned my name is Rema I am a ux researcher and I'm going to be presenting on the evolution of ux research in a turbulent Tech market so just right off the bat thank you so much to accelerent research for the invitation to speak and thank you all for attending my talk and being active participants before we dive into the topic for today I want to tell you a little bit about myself I've been a design researcher and strategist for about six years I'm currently one of the vpu research leads at JP Morgan Chase I also received my masters in public health in Behavioral Science and health communication so a lot of the work and experience that I have is across healthc care social justice nonprofit and Pharma but I also have worked across finance and Tech so I can answer questions related to all of those Industries I've also worked both in agency and in house so I can ask answer questions about that I'm currently an adless Mentor for early career and career transitioners so if you have questions for me please sign up through my ADP list mentorship platform I'm happy to answer questions after this call as well and my special sauce of course is Healthcare and social justice it relates back to my masters and that's like where most of my experience lies so if you have questions about that even if it's not related to today's presentation I'm happy to answer those and of course connect with me on LinkedIn at the end of this presentation so today's talk is kind of Center on two kind of main things the first I'm going to outline the current Tech market and its need for more strategic researchers and in the second half we'll talk about how you can become more strategic researcher yourself before ending with a Q&A so for a lot of you who are attending this conference it's probably no surprise that the past two or three years in Tech has been extremely turbulent this trend will most likely continue into 20 2 especially given our most recent election results according to Mercury News over 49,000 jobs have been slashed since 2022 as companies adjust to the post-pandemic era while the pace of job Cuts seems to be slowing down the second half of 2024 companies like meta Cisco and Muro are still laying off people as recently as the past couple of weeks and during these like really big layoffs most major news outlets claim that engineers and designers were the ones who were most impacted by layoffs but when we look at the proportion of who's actually being laid off it's seemingly ux research and it's because software Engineers there's just way more of them and so way more of them were laid off but there are fewer researchers and of those few researchers a lot bigger proportion or percentage was laid off loton pbus he is a uxr consultant and expert has made claims that the reason from this is um simple and he has claimed that the uxr hiring has decreased a whopping 82% because that ux research is a luxury role that targets that's targeted first during difficult times Jud Anton kind of went viral the last couple years by writing this article called the ux research Reckoning is here a lot of you may have seen it and read it and in this article he claims that research is a dying art in the form that it currently exists and we have to evolve so that companies continue to see value in ux research so this I kind of just talked for a while and all of it seems incredibly Bleak but a lot of news outlets and data analysts are actually recently claiming more hopeful news they claim that the tech Market is slowly bouncing back and with that bounce back we're seeing some increases in hiring of research roles so let's zoom in on Research hiring over the past 3 years according to live data technology ux research is currently the number two growing role in Tech between 2020 and 2022 Tech Giants over hired ux RS leading to an all-time peak in 2022 as you can see in this graph and then layoffs resulted in a steep decline from 2022 to 2023 but now we're seeing a slight increase going into 2024 so you're all probably wondering what's actually going on is the market completely crazy and constantly laying off are we actually hiring um well some people are hiring and some people are still laying off resulting in a research Market that's incredibly oversaturated and still overly competitive I personally don't really have an answer for when things are going to get better and stay better but I can definitely guide you on what companies that are currently hiring are looking for in their researchers companies want strategic researchers that can bleed into many different disciplines and deliver impactful business results and so you're probably all wondering how do I become a strategic researcher I'm going to lay out three kind of solutions that I perceive as an easy way to become a more strategic researcher and the first is going to be understanding and investing in the right problem so research can often become a checklist on the product delivery life cycle for a lot of stakeholders and stakeholders often view research as something that helps them learn more about their users but it isn't just about learning about your users but applying those learnings to make better decisions for your user and for your business and as a strategic researcher you have to be able to reframe your problems and ask the right questions so you're avoiding getting stuck in tactical research testing like usability testing where you're constantly doing research like should this button be blue or yellow what do I mean by this let's use the design Double Diamond to explained for those of you who aren't familiar with this the design Double Diamond is a design process model that help helps designers researchers and product stakeholders solve problems and develop products the first diamond is often referred to as the problem space and this is where researchers do or should do most of their work to understand opportunities gaps and pain points and the second diamond is often referred to as the solution space this is usually more delivery focused where stakeholders will begin to design the product and actually develop it and evaluate its function the design Double Diamond is broken down into four phases starting with discover with discover researchers are really going to be understanding the true Problem by generating as many ideas and information as possible this phase involves speaking to and spending time with people who are affected by the problem and Define you're going to take the insights that you gathered from the discovery phase and converge Upon A focused problem the true problem the right problem in develop you're going to expand upon that Problem by designing and iterating rapidly to define a bunch of different design solutions that solve that true problem and then in deliver you're going to converge again to figure out the best design solution through testing and evaluation right now in our current market businesses often struggle because they force researchers into that second Diamond space and you end up focusing on tactical research that is really really nitty-gritty usability testing that is refining a pro product that never really an the true problem to begin with as a researcher it's your job to Advocate that businesses understand and invest in solving the right problem let's look at an example of understanding and investing in the right problem imagine that you're an owner of an office building and your tenants are complaining about an elevator it's old and slow and they have to wait a lot several tenants are threatening to break their lease if you don't fix the problem so if you ask anyone how do you solve this problem they're probably going to say well replace the elevator install a stronger motor maybe change the algorithm of the elevator so that runs the elevator better and these suggestions are not wrong but there are a cluster of solutions that share the assumption that the problem is the elevator is too slow but when you use design thinking and strategic research researchers can help you find the real problem and invest in a better solution the real problem is not that the elevator is too slow the real problem is that the weight is annoying and when you understand and reframe that problem there's a more elegant solution now if you've ever gone into a big corporate building in New York or any major city they have mirrors on the elevator why do they do this because people are obsessed with looking at themselves they stare at themselves and they lose track of time and then they don't realize the elevator is taking so long other ways that you might get distracted is they're playing music in the lobby they might do an art installation and while again the initial framing of the problem isn't wrong the elevator is too slow when you reframe the problem you're able to think of a faster cheaper solution for the building owners that will keep the tenants just as Satisfied by solving the right problem strategic researchers can help companies align on a product Vision goals and okr planning this is usually achieved in the first two phases of the Double Diamond so the way that you get to the right problem is also by asking the right questions in each phase of the Double Diamond and the first diamond space you're going to want to figure out are we building the right thing and in the second Diamond you're figuring out are we building the thing right so some questions you might want to ask are what are a customers problems and opportunities what ideas and concept solve our customers needs which solution should we build to support all use cases and does the solution work as expected and while you're kind of in different phases of this Double Diamond you're going to have a lot of deliverables that are going to look different for example in the first phase you might be doing field research or competitive analysis in the second phase you're doing concept testing or user Journeys in the third phase you could be doing service design or card sorting in the first in the fourth phase you might be doing usability testing or click tracking while the design diamond is structured linearly in format part of your job is also identifying where you are in this phase you can start working on the true problem at the beginning middle or end of this linear design Diamond depending on the type of problem you're trying to solve so what we've learned so far is asking the right questions will help you identify and frame the right problem and this will in turn lead you to pick the right research methodologies to get your stakeholders impactful answers another way that you can become a more strategic researcher is focusing on delivering business results let's throw back to Jud Anton's viral ux Reckoning article that I mentioned earlier in that article he says that researchers have been doing too much middle range and tactical research he advocated that for ux research to survive the wave of layoffs we have to get more macro with our research macro research is strategic in nature business first and future thinking as a strategic researcher you have to make sure that your outputs contribute directly to business's bottom line to do that you have to understand and apply business strategy this means you must have a strong understanding of what drives Revenue what the company values the most and how success is measured this will allow you to map user goals and ux strategy against business objectives and a good ux strategy will ultimately align to business strategy to reduce cost and risk you might need to dive deeper into a business model into Target markets competitive Landscapes you might also need to start involving a variety of stakeholders earlier on into your research process while ux strategy and business strategy align it will enable companies to deliver impactful business results and successful products so let's take a look at how a researcher can actually apply their interpretation of business strategy so once you understand business impact and business strategy you can help Define and influence a product Vision a product Vision outlines what executive level stakeholders desire for a product far into the future like 5 to 10 years and usually it takes into consideration business impact guiding values for principles of the company and any guardrails that they want the product teams to apply you can help Define a product Vision by Leading workshops like a visioning workshop with executive level stakeholders sometimes at your company product managers or design strategists might already be involved in leading this effort this is an example how of how you can start involving key stakeholders in early and often as well after you help to Define this product vision you can also get involved in setting okrs or objectives and key results okrs outline smart goals that need to be accomplished to achieve product Vision strategic researchers collaborate to develop okrs with product managers and leadership team members by Leading strategic prioritization workshops or goal setting workshops strategic researchers can also help identify unique selling points through competitive analysis a value prop areas of differentiation or Benchmark against industry standards to ensure that your product is staying ahead of the curve in this space so what we've talked through so far is considered the Strategic road map and this is often where leadership focuses most of their energy a strategic road map demonstrates varied outcomes with stable Horizons that will change yearly through planning processes and from this point forward leadership will kind of hand off the ideas that you've helped build product vision and the okrs to the product teams to start generating Solutions ideas and as a strategic researcher this is where that first Double Diamond will come in and you're going to start doing a lot more Discovery research this is where you're going to be identifying user pain points opportunities and jobs to be done to help prod product teams focus on the key opportunities they have for example you might start running a codesign session with M users to or do field research and all of these things will help the product team rapidly generate ideas that can tackle the okr outlined by leadership after synthesizing customer need against business need you and your product team can work towards iding Solutions and identifying which Solutions make the most sense to invest in you might ask in this space which ideas have we validated that are solutions worth building and how can we test these hypotheses cost effectively and efficiently these Solutions will eventually now be the basis for building specific features and user stories and your features can now lad all the way back up to a business strategy and have a likelihood of solving customer problems and achieving business goals your products will now most definitely be high impact thereby enhancing user adoption and retention and at this point in the journey you'll start doing more tactical research to test these features rather than Discovery research and this half of the graph that you kind of see on the screen is referred to as the product road map which will demonstrate varied outputs with varying time Horizons that change monthly through through product management Pro planning processes at the end of the day remember that your company really only cares about its bottom line are we making profit and if your research stays to Middle range it's going to be ignored an an effort to focus on the money good strategic researchers know when to advocate for macro strategic research and even when to advocate for microt tactical research that will drive business bottom lines and then my last recommendation that I'll give you to diversify your skill set move it into a more strategic research format is diversifying your research skills in general and when I say that a lot of people think well I should move into qual research if I'm doing Quant research but in my opinion design research is actually just a broad term for AI wide array of research types and each of the roles that you see on your screen is utilizing the same skills the same critical thinking skills and in each of these roles you're kind of identifying the right problem choosing the appropriate methodology to solve for that problem and then picking a deliverable to explain your answer the goal of each of these titles is understanding what that real problem is and an effort to solve the problem and provide the end user the most optimized experience so all of the deliverables and methodologies that you're using for each of these separate titles might be different but the critical thinking that you need is the same and the methodologies and tools that you're using are just tools to help you solve those problems let's dive into some of the categories so that we can see similarities between each role so far we've been talking about ux research and ux research is the process of studying and Gathering insights on how users interact with a product or service by understanding its users needs behaviors and pain points so this type of research usually focuses on the what a user interacts with and solves problems related to a specific physical or digital product so let's think of an example a ux researcher or a clothing website company could just be focusing on the live chat function where users can go to return products that they've got so they would only be focusing on that one product the live chat feature for returns a lot of times people think oh I'm a ux researcher I can diversify my skills by expanding my methodology and bleeding into qual roles like if you're already a Quant researcher if you're a call researcher you might consider becoming more mixed methods and trying different methodologies that you see on this graph but in reality you can also bleed into other technically other roles like service design so service design refers to planning and organizing business resources people props and processes to deliver the customer experience think of service design as the how a user experience gets created service design designs for that how by aligning and understanding an organization's needs and internal parts to deliver a full experience so let's go back to our clothing store example remember a ux researcher is only going to focus on that live chat returns feature but a service designer is going to consider how the user is actually getting that return back to the store after interacting with the live chat who's building the return label what systems need to send them the email receipt how does the delivery driver get the package how does the factory work a catalog receipt of the package service designers often critical when you're building and executing against a strategic road map because you're thinking about the interconnectivity of multiple different products and parts so like ux research service design is still focusing on optimizing experience but the scope of the problem is much broader you still have to use the same critical thinking skills that you would in a uxr role that you do in a service design role service design also has its own adjacent field that you can bleed into for example at some companies a service designer might be called an interaction designer other companies might call service design CX research CX research focuses on the entire customers journey across all touch points with a company and CX research can be critical because you start thinking more about products horizontally so let's go back to our clothing store example a CX researcher is not just thinking about that one live chat feature but they're also thinking about the shopping cart feature and the product page feature and how each of those pages are going to be linked and how a user's journey is going to flow through each of those pages now the last kind of area that I'll talk through or title that I'll talk through is design strategy and we've already discussed design strategy for quite a bit in this presentation so design strategy is a process of identifying the right product vision and goals and then aligning them to business objectives and user needs design strategy and ux strategy helps a product team build strategic priorities for product wrote down and it's really similar to ux research because you're just expanding the scale at which you're thinking you're not just focused on one feature but many different features so again while some might consider a design strateg role a unique role it's actually just doing what researchers are doing but at a completely different scale one way to expand your design strategy skills is to explore participatory design like codesign methodology and codesign involves bringing in the end user as a stakeholder into your design design thinking process together you might generate new ideas from scratch or have them revise existing ideas that are in testing so again I'm of the opinion that strategic researchers Focus Less on pige and holding themselves into one title they leverage critical thinking skills to solve problems that can vary in scale scope or required skill and this can be divers be done by diversifying within a category like within ux research you're moving from qualt to Quant or by bleeding into another role like doing service design when you're a ux researcher if you kind of start implementing these tools and diversifying your research skills your title May no longer read ux researcher or Market researcher your resume might be a little bit more flexible for applying to other roles in Tech and other spaces to make you a more hirable candidate and you might even be able to bleed into other traditional Tech roles like product management eventually down the line so I will leave you with this summary a strategic researcher doesn't focus on on just beefing up their resume knowing how to do every type of methodology or use every type of software they Thrive by diagnosing the right problem delivering solutions that keep business outcomes top of mind and diversifying their skill set to be able to choose the right methodology to solve the right problems and I think that this deck is going to be circulated around after but I put in some resources for you guys to access um some of these articles are going to be a starter pack on understanding strategic research and design thinking a lot of these people that I've linked here are also people that I personally know or follow who are uxr experts that are kind of touting similar things that we've talked about today there are a couple sites that I use as reference guides to stay up to dat and some of these books will teach you new methodologies as well as give you like a quick oneon-one on design thinking so thank you so much and don't forget to connect with me on LinkedIn after this conference is over and I guess we'll do questions yes we will uh very very good Rema thank you for that um we've got few questions rolling in everybody just drop those into uh into chat or a Q&A on your respective platforms and and we'll watch those um sorry scrolling through I know Donald had a comment kind of question for the audience this was early in the presentation you kind of got into some of this but Donald ask I I wonder how market research feels about ux research wanting to be strategic heading towards strategy is not a blue ocean approach in most non-tech organizations yeah I think that so I actually used to work in market research early in my career and then I pivoted to ux research and one of the reasons that I spoke about research being research regardless of the title that you have is because the skills that I Ed and the tools that I use being a market researcher were completely synonymous to the ones that I use as ux researcher in Tech um so while strategic research might not completely apply for a market researcher in the same ways that it does for ux researcher I do think that there's ways to get more involved um in brand strategy or product strategy at advertising organizations or even marketing organizations in similar ways that ux researchers do um because I definitely see parallels in what I used to do versus what I do now I hope that answers your question yeah and I you know I'll just kind of comment on what I'm seeing in the industry I think everyone in attendant should really take take note of of what's being discussed right if you're not noticing this already you're going to um these two worlds are going to begin colliding it's just you know organizations are realizing that they've got folks in different silos doing much of the same activity there is going to be a natural sort of melding of of of this into you know whatever we want to call it strategic insights you know whatever right um but it's it it's happening it's already beginning to happen my recommendation to everyone is regardless of where you sit in an organization you should start you know at the very least having conversations with those who are in these other locations networking internally getting to know one another cuz this evolution is going to kind of keep happening right um we did have one comment over on YouTube which is over on this screen um from Ramsay and when faced with a deep details statistical quantitative uxr Focus do you have any suggestions to help leadership change focus into a more macro uxr strategy perspective yeah that's tough because a lot of my experience is qualitative so I'll do my best to answer the question I have worked with a lot of quantitative research ERS um I've also worked with a lot of data scientists and data analysts and I feel like they tend to Pigeon hold themselves the most because they see themselves as only people who work with data but I think that a lot of businesses Thrive because they understand numbers the most so I think that it's actually a pro that you're so data focused and Quant focused I think that you need to be able to tell a story with that data though and I think that's where people struggle a lot um when they're coming from a very data specific mindset like you can't just present the numbers you kind of have to show them a reason why they should be investing into whatever macro research you want to be doing and data people can really be helpful in showing them that a lot of businesses only care about their bottom lines and that's presented to them in numbers and percentages and like increases in engagement so you can definitely get more involved in shaping the story of macro research by utilizing qu Quant methodologies a little bit more does that answer your question question Ramsey while we're waiting for that we'll grab a question from Sarah so Sarah says I'm currently a sole uxr embedded in an IT team for a health system how would you recommend getting involved in strategic planning anything beyond tying my findings insights recommendations back to knowing business goals and keeping stakeholders involved in my process yeah this is a great question and I actually work contract as a solo researcher in a health system as well so I have very onetoone explanations for this um so a lot of what I've noticed is that old school corporations that work in healthcare or Finance are still in 1995 when it comes to Tech and they really struggle to understand design strategy and design thinking in the way that Facebook Netflix Amazon would and so your job is going to have to be relationship building and Trust for a huge part of your time there as a solar researcher and the way that I kind of do that even now working in finance is by doing a little bit more tactical research rapidly and like focusing on evaluative research to get them to understand and build trust in my thinking and then I'll kind of start sneaking in like hey what if we do this strategic workshop and here's why I think it would be beneficial um so I don't think you're doing anything necessarily wrong wrong but I think that the focus shouldn't necessarily be on your skill but building that trust and like building understanding that your stakeholders probably currently don't have in the design thinking process that might look like having like open Office hours where they can come and ask you questions about your role that might look like um you're having a design strategy launch chat and you're talking about examples of how you can tie things back into your company um you can also just do the work and a lot of times that's what do I just do it without asking and then show people um and they usually start being like oh I didn't know that I could do things this way what do you recommend next um so I don't think you're doing anything wrong but I would focus a little bit more on that relationship aspect and that storytelling aspect um and building trust aspect and it is a process um you know just trying to chip away at any resistance and get more that seat at the table right yeah uh I've got one from Brett um I would also add as researchers we exceed as as we connect the dots and work cross functionally within organizations knowledge is power though it might not be in our job roles the ability to triangulate multiple data sources is crucial for impact in lar large organizations versus staying in your swim Lane yeah I totally agree with that I don't think that staying in your swim Lane is safe anymore I think that's how middle range research ends up happening a lot more um I think that you kind of echoed everything that I said in my presentation yeah you got to be diverse with your data sources in your skill set pick up your head and pay attention um but do so carefully and politically and without making too many waves right that's that's the fun part of what we do that they don't teach us in in research school um we did get a verbal thumbs up from Ramsay um that you answered his question um and then we've got one let's see any recommendations on exploring or transitioning from market research to ux research roles yeah so when I was doing my transition um it was during covid so there was a big boom in research and it was much easier for me to transition but I kind of came from not only market research but also like academic research so um my big hump was understanding lingo of tech like I think that's why a lot of times people think that market research and ux research are so different because they have they're talking about the same thing but they're using completely different corporate jargon for the same thing so I think that the way that I kind of got over that hurdle was talking to as many people as possible like I would Co call people on LinkedIn just ask them like all my stupid questions about tech as someone who was like new and early to Tech and that's how I learned how to speak and like present my case studies as um something that they would understand so I used to work at Facebook and one of the case studies that I presented was not a ux research case study it was a market research case study that I spoke about in the lingo that they understand and that was one of the reasons that I got hired was because they were able to understand my critical thinking process and like how I got to what decisions I got to so I would say that's the first thing is like learn the lingo the second thing is I did look into like grad school options I personally don't think that that's like the way for me to go that is an option if you want to consider that option sometime people do boot camps if you want to do a boot camp that is another option that you could explore but I did mine organically and it was mostly through networking um some really great mentors that I have and like reading books and articles online it's I think once you get over the hump of the lingo you will probably be fine and be able to interview well always be networking um having conversations both internally and externally are so huge and it just it adds up attending conferences like you're doing right now that's always a good thing but just any ways to ring this point you know that you can get sources of information to become smarter about this thing and more strategic um let's see we have another one here uh what role does experience in the do domain or organization play in the ability ability to be seen as strategic so I have a clarifying question back do you mean um like if you have experience in healthcare does that benefit you more in the interview process is that kind of what you're asking I'm I'm assuming yes I'm gonna assume yes as well and come in and clarify so yes and I think that but with like asterisk yes um I think coming from Healthcare background and having my masters in public health yes obviously having my masters in public health and like being an ex Premed person I understand a lot more jargon in the healthc care space that other people would not so when I start day one I'm already going to be further along than another person who came from like Finance or like GM or something like that um but a lot of people like people take two kind of different tracks sometimes people specializ into like I'm just going to be working in healthcare and some of these roles will get like super specific and only hire for people who have Healthcare experience but some people are like still building out their structures and they have no idea what they're doing and they're looking for people who are experts in Tech or experts in research not experts in the industry and they expect that you're going to have to learn on the job so that's why I said yes with an asterisk because it's always better and in an overly competitive market if you had two people with the same resumes but one person has experience in the industry and one doesn't they're probably going to prefer the one with the experience in the industry but it's not necessarily like an end all be all you can definitely bleed in to one domain and move into another one um I wouldn't say our roles are industry specific uh we have another one from manyy uh what are some unique challenges you face in conducting ux research within Financial Services especially with factors like security and compliance yeah um Finance is very very similar to Healthcare in how it's structured in terms of privacy in terms of security in terms of like all the government guidelines that we have to follow um so yeah it's hard it's much slower I think that um that's a huge thing that's different like I used to work at Facebook where I'd be turning out like six to seven studies a month and now at Chase it might take me like three months to run one study and it's because we have like the barrier of people need to understand design thinking so I'm spending a lot of my time teaching design thinking and teaching the value of research um another thing is like security guidelines and like the government gets really involved with like finance and privacy and data security so there's a lot of like legal um stops and obstacles that we have to get through and so what ends up happening is usually research is slower um but if your company is bought into investing in research and doing the right type of design thinking there's going to be a different energy and culture around learning and it'll be like fun to go to work because people actually care what you think and I think that is the culture of Chase right now where I'm working I will say financial services and Healthcare definitely you know at the front end from a privacy standpoint but everybody else is catching up um so you know if you're not thinking about it you you will certainly be asked to do so in the not distant future and how is that going to impact the research that you're trying to do the people you're trying to connect with um you know good times uh let's see do ux researchers need a portfolio should I be creating one yeah um I have one you don't necessarily need one um it depends it depends which is like a ux res I'm laughing because that's like a ux researcher's favorite answer it depends um I think that if you're earlier in your career yeah definitely have a portfolio um that is how they will be able to see if you walk the walk like not just talk the top it'll give you examples of your work um I wouldn't put as much effort into your portfolio as you do into your case studies because that's what you're going to interview with a lot of people once they get higher up into TX research they don't have a portfolio and they just see it as like a cover letter now where it's like just something else that they're asking for that you don't want to build I know a lot of people who are successful earlier in their career careers who never had portfolios so it's really up to you and what you want to demonstrate and how like what part of your career you're in and like I guess what the market looks like Q&A be may be winding down no we've got Kevin um what other steps do you suggest for those who have no tech industry backgrounds but try to transfer over from Healthcare or other Industries uh two Tech ux research yeah I would say again the first thing is the lingo like if you don't know how to talk like tech people tech people will ignore you and they won't understand what you're saying and kind of be bought out um but I did I I did the exact kind of transfer that you're talking about I used to work at a Pharma advertising um agency as a strategist like a brand strategist and a market researcher and then I trained transferred over to doing more human centered design and then ux research I think that my second step was like getting work experience however possible you can like whatever they're looking for um whether that's like through an internship on the side doing pro bono work like doing work at your job that was is not in your real job description all of those things were things that I did to kind of get the experience that I needed to push myself into being branded on my resume or my portfolio as a ux researcher and have some of the experience that they're looking for so to synopsize learn the lingo but then also get as much experience as possible whether that's on the job or off the job agree and you know the research expertise that's the foundation right I mean the you know the learning of the lingo and figuring out who you're supporting I won't say that's the easy part but when you've got that expertise and experience it's you you can be more Nimble and start to get into some of these areas where it seems daunting and it seems foreign but you know to the point you've been making I mean once you start doing that it actually becomes quite I don't want to say simple but you know not as bad as one would think right um let's see how do you think policy changes being introduced uh by the new Administration will impact the ux research job market how do you think it will impact the day today um okay so I've actually yeah I've been wondering about this a lot actually the past couple weeks um I do think that there's like kind of two sides to the coin like some people are saying that the econom is going to be booming some people are saying that it's going to completely tank and if it completely tanks with a recession there is like a lot of job loss and like we kind of saw that with the tech Market already kind of Teeter tottering with covid um we saw that in the 2009 recession when like a lot of people were laid off um I am kind of gearing up for not the best case scenario and that's why I'm giving this talk today is to like prepare you as best as possible to float through the storm um I do think that certain industries will stop hiring for research roles certain industries might start doing it more like for example if there are divestments made from government grants and stuff like that ctech will definitely see a dip and you probably won't see a lot of agencies hiring for ux researchers if you work in government Tech um but Health Care might go up Finance might go up I can't predict which Industries are going to do what but I do think that there is going to be a rumble diversify your research portfolio just as you would in finance um all right it looks like we are winding down on the Q&A I think we can close with a comment from Ellie who's echoing a lot of what what you're saying but um see um with regard to transitioning into ux uh if if you're interviewing at a Fang company like meta be prepared to also have several rounds of interviews where you just talk about research skills where using terminology is key for doing well in these interviews brushing up on vocabulary you may or may not use every day um yeah and then while we were talking uh Wilkins dropped a tech lingo question mark are we talking coding language or more Tech develop processes such as agile yeah definitely not coding language I'm saying something as simple as like when I worked in Academia um evaluative research was not called evaluative research it was called uh like summative research and so if I said Summit of research in an interview like no one would know what I'm talking about um so that's like a simple way of like they literally use different terms for synonymous things like you might call something a qualitative interview but like in Tech it's called a qualitative interview but sometimes they call it an IDI sometimes they call it something completely different and so it's just like becoming aware it's like translating languages almost like from English to like another English basically um it's not necessarily you I don't know everything about coding you just need to know enough to like communicate about your research and you're thinking well and I think people who go from Academia to ux research struggle with this a lot because their terminology is completely different and their timelines for research are completely different um and they get really nitty-gritty with their research and so I think that that's kind of like a really good example of how changing your lingo can be really drastic for Market researchers since you already work in Industry you already work at a corporate organization they'll probably be less of a jump um but it's usually like exactly what Ellie said uh you got to learn the vocabulary so that you can communicate about how your doing your research and whether you're using the right methodologies to them in the language that they understand and yes if if you have more questions about this I have like so many different resources about um how you can prepare for your interviews and how you could be asking the right questions in interviews so I'm happy to send those along as well I'll standing um yeah and just a lot of comments coming through in in chats of all kind uh just well received very good presentation everybody's everybody's feeling you so good job way way to kick us off um I think that concludes the Q and the a um and and rema's presentation um that was great thank you so much a couple questions about just from a housekeeping standpoint uh yes we will be posting archive videos um so if you've missed anything you will have the opportunity to to watch it on on the replay um give us a couple of days to to Archive those videos um otherwise I think we've got about 10 minutes until our next presentation so we're just going to sit tight for a few grab a cup of Coffey um check your email uh but then we will Circle back at the top of the hour for our next presentation Rema thank you much have a great day