The choice to move to the Bay Area to live with my partner eventually pushed me out of my comfort zone.

I have a background in political science, international relations, and modern Turkey studies, I came to the US for a sociology doctoral program, earned a master’s degree in sociology and found myself stuck at a level that academics call “all-but-dissertation”.  

So when I decided to move to the Bay Area from New York and looked for non-academic jobs, the question 'where could I fit in as someone passionate about researching the conditions of human life' led me to a domain I had never heard of: user experience. When I discovered ‘user experience’ or ‘UX’, I was struck by the prevalent need for UX professionals in the Bay Area, the objectives of the UX domain and the skills it required. These objectives and skills surprisingly aligned with what I had been trying to develop as a scholar.  So could I, as a social science researcher, actually be useful in this engineer-developer-VC haven?   

By May 2019, I started working as a full-time UX practitioner at a boutique UX design and research company - EchoUser. After a year-long, steep learning curve, I have come to learn and borrow from both worlds of research. I haven’t yet found the perfect recipe for those who are disillusioned by the prospects of their current domain, and ready to channel their analytical, organizational, interpersonal skills into improving our interaction with everyday things; i.e., UX. Nevertheless, I hope you can benefit from my experience of having straddled both worlds. 

UX as a discipline to elevate human’s place in design

At the core of my learning was my comprehension of UX as a developing and interdisciplinary field that builds upon Human-Computer Interaction, Human Factors, Visual Design, Behavioral Psychology and other disciplines. As someone coming from an interdisciplinary background of social sciences and humanities,  and invested significant time towards understanding intricacies of many things social,  I came to appreciate the world of systemic efforts that seek to explain how ordinary things work, and the expertise behind it. So the introduction to the UX field made me realize the accumulated efforts devoted to developing a vocabulary for every interface element and user interaction, and the established principles that guide these interfaces and interactions. 

What stood out to me in this discovery was the importance of the human experience in the world of technology that I presumed prioritized economic capital, was obsessed with more powerful machines and only welcomed people with high computing skills. The embracement of human experience in designing our interactions with the world blew (some) soul into what I used to see as a mechanical system of cogs and wheels. 

Research as means vs. research as the end

For the first time in my life, I was conducting research for products that people interacted with daily to do their work. The research had tangible contexts and direct impact. This was categorically different from having previously researched big societal questions that mostly had elusive contexts and intangible effects: for example -  understanding the impact of Westernization policies over the social knowledge space of a Middle Eastern country.

Many processes in academia are built on the premise that one should take the necessary time to make a study and its report near perfect. In UX, there are science-resembling practices that apply to data collection and analysis. However, the ultimate objective of the study is to inform the next steps for the design of the product as efficiently and as effectively as possible. This realization made me reconsider the importance I attributed to rigor and comprehensiveness and pay more attention to practicality, clarity, and conciseness. 

Storytelling for guidance vs. reporting results

My third learning is related to the effectiveness of reporting research results. I soon came to realize that as UX consultants, we carry the responsibility to understand and tailor research output to deliver the most value for stakeholders. We are responsible for effectively and creatively communicating the findings to help prioritize the product team’s next steps. This requires devoting time towards storytelling to communicate and immerse stakeholders in the insights to compel action.

In UX consultancy, the deliverables facilitate decision making for the audience but do not require to thoroughly engage with the study findings or to immerse themselves into the entire context of the research endeavor.  In fact, it is less effective if the report can’t communicate striking and easy to digest messages since decision-makers choose to outsource research studies they don’t have time and resources for, and they need to make quick progress. This is why storytelling takes precedence over detail and rigor in UX research - a practice that social scientists and humanities scholars could perhaps partially embrace, too! 

Social science and humanities scholarship is consumed by a more homogeneous audience: researchers that engage with others’ research to elevate the practices of the domain and to incorporate findings to their research. Thus urgency and practicality do not rank high on the to-do list, and scholars can load more responsibility to their audience to interpret their research or how to make use of it.

Exchange among all researchers is possible

My transition from scholarly research to UX consultancy has required a great deal of adaptation and re-professionalization. As much as the distinction between academic and industry research is well-established, I think practitioners of human-centered research can find lessons in each other’s approaches. 

Even though UX practitioners conduct research for business needs (and therefore bound by business agreements), they can use the opportunities to learn about the underlying interdisciplinary field and contribute to the accumulation and publicization of UX knowledge if they can afford not getting swayed by the pace of product development cycles or transience of business engagements. 

If UX research can survive beyond the immediate consumption of product teams and be publicized more; the siloed and highly contextualized insights can also contribute towards the efforts of producing domain knowledge. Besides, openness can increase the rigor and accountability for UX researchers while also making it easier to understand and appreciate the domain for outsiders.  The idea here is not to create another blog post about best practices in UX but to create opportunities for deepening (i.e. a repository of industry UX studies, where studies can talk to each other), as well as opportunities for widening (i.e. studies of different domains talking to each other). I was pleasantly surprised at the recent UXRConf 2020, to see a balance between disclosing deeper research contexts and professional learnings, to the general audience, in a palatable way. At a humble and minor scale, at EchoUser we make an effort to provide access to our projects by documenting our projects as case studies. 

On the other hand, scholarly researchers, especially those in social sciences and humanities, can draw inspiration from UX collaborative work environments with (usually) rapid cycles of project completion, and how that translates into efficient and effective output. 

Social science and humanities programs devote years to teaching domains of knowledge and knowledge production techniques, however, they lack the initiatives to help students work on iterative, fast-paced, and collaborative projects (something beyond standard course “papers”) to enable mastery of research by repetition. The objective of many social science and humanities programs is to produce domain experts with dissertations while expecting graduate students to be project founders, but programs do not care so much to help sharpen non-scholarly applications of research skills. Programs should offer students exposure to the other worlds of human research to prepare them to take on any research problem thrown at them, and inform them of exit strategies, should they be challenged as project founders or as job-seekers in the academic or nonprofit world.