Conquering the Product Researcher Interview: A Guide to Landing Your Dream Job

Toptal sourced essential questions that the best UX researchers can answer. Driven from our community, we encourage experts to submit questions and offer feedback.

What would be the top four challenges UX researchers face in the current environment?

One attribute of a great UX researcher is the ability to evaluate their work objectively. There are problems that every UX researcher wants to solve in a meaningful way, no matter what stage of their career they are in.

Listen for answers that not only describe the challenges they may face but how they overcome them.

According to a recent study, these are the four challenges UX researchers face today:

• Inclusion in the product development process
• Sourcing the right participants for UX research
• Securing resources and budget
• Getting executive buy-in about UX research

If you talk to a UX researcher, they might not name these four exact problems, but they should talk about problems that UX researchers face every day. What you should listen for is the UX researcher showing that they understand the problem and are ready to find different ways to solve it. Ask about how they overcame them.

Listen for answers that include overcoming challenges of working with others with different agendas. Working with people from other fields, like C-level executives, marketing teams, sales teams, growth teams, product managers, engineers, and designers, will always be hard for a UX researcher.

Some stakeholders might not understand why they need to do UX research because it costs too much and takes too long. How do they get around these problems? How do they make sure that their work fits in with the company’s brand, marketing, and goals?

For instance, it can be hard to persuade a company that they need more in-depth user research before they design a product or that they need to do proper usability testing during the product design lifecycle. How do they advocate for those mentioned above in making their case?.

Follow-up questions on this topic:

• Can you tell me about a time when one of these problems came up in a project you worked on before and how you solved it?
• What were the outcomes of this approach?

2 .

Describe your UX research process and what methods you follow.

Every day, UX research is changing and looking for new ways to help with product design and solve issues. The way that experienced UX researchers do their work is likely still evolving, and it will be different from one UX researcher to the next.

People who are good at UX research will often talk about the “toolkit” they use to solve problems or work on projects. Depending on resources and time given for research, listen for their flexibility with approaches. Great UX researchers are always interested in learning more about how they can help users and solve their problems. When working with the limitations they have, a UX researcher will pull out their toolbox and use the best research methods that fit those limitations.

Listen for applying different methods of UX research depending on the project. There is primary and secondary UX research, qualitative and quantitative UX research, generative and evaluative UX research. Generative research is conducted during the beginning of the investigative process. It helps UX researchers clearly define a problem and generate a hypothesis for its solution. Near the end of the research process, evaluative research is used to test and improve ideas until the best solution is found.

One main idea should be to focus on people when doing research. You could talk about “design thinking,” which means fully understanding both user and business goals. A few of the main ideas or methods that are used in this process are competitive audits, stakeholder interviews, user personas, empathy maps, user research, content audits, minimum viable product (MVP) lean UX, and usability testing. They might also talk about user testing (moderated or unmoderated, in-person or remote), A/B testing, eye tracking, click-tracking heatmaps, and other types of quantitative analytics.

Besides these, look for UX research methods that help match the product’s design with marketing and business goals, as well as those that include the company’s brand promise. Each of the above UX research methods can help you make a product that users will love if you use them and learn directly from users. 3 .

Is UX research important? Why?

Because it’s such an important part of the human-centered UX design process, a great UX researcher should really care about the need for UX research. UX research guides subsequent stages in design to provide effective solutions to customer problems. It is “the soul of the product build process. UX research is important because it helps you decide which features to focus on and makes a project more clear.

It’s important for a good UX researcher to explain why UX research is important, give examples, and talk about the need to:

• Think about the person who will be using the product and design it from their point of view.
• Identify the product’s potential user base and build user personas
• Understand users’ behavior, goals, and motivations
• Deep dive into specific areas to identify user needs
• Get useful information from UX research to help with the product design process.

Please listen to the following great reasons for doing UX research to see why it’s important.

• For making a product that really helps people, you need to know a lot about your users and how they think. Otherwise, you won’t know if your design is meaningful to them. A design that doesn’t appeal to the people it’s meant for will never be successful.
• “If the user is having a problem, it’s our problem” is a favorite quote from Steve Jobs that helps us make products that are easy and fun to use. “If your users don’t have a great experience with your product, they will probably switch to something else.
• To prove the return on investment (ROI) of user experience design and be able to show: Better performance and credibility; More exposure and sales; A bigger customer base

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How do you approach UX research?

The answer will help you discover what kind of UX researcher you may be hiring.

Pay attention to answers that talk about empathy, such as “walking a mile in a customer’s shoes” (customer journeys) and designing products with people and their needs in mind. Empathizing with people often means engaging in in-depth user research to solve problems. If you want to find good solutions, you need to ask the right questions. To ask good questions, researchers need to be able to connect with people and do in-depth UX research to find relevant information.

Also, listen for two main types of user research, such as qualitative research and quantitative research. Finding insights through qualitative research and describing things that can be seen but not calculated is what it’s all about. Qualitative user research is a direct assessment of behavior based on observation. It’s about understanding people’s beliefs and practices on their terms. It can involve several different methods, including contextual observation, ethnographic studies, interviews, field studies, and moderated usability tests.

Quantitative research is mostly exploratory and is used to figure out how big a problem is by collecting numbers or information that can be turned into useful statistics. Different types of surveys (online, paper, mobile, and kiosk surveys), longitudinal studies, website interceptors, online polls, and systematic observations are all common ways to gather data.

It is best to balance the quantitative data from analytics platforms with the qualitative information gleaned from other UX testing methods, like usability testing or focus groups. The analytical data will show patterns that may be useful for deciding what assumptions to test further.

Most good UX researchers know that it’s important to find the right balance between different types of research for each situation. A great UX researcher doesn’t rely on one or the other exclusively. It’s about the right mix of the two. To give you an example, they need to do qualitative research because the most important data isn’t always measurable, and quantitative analysis is often too narrow to be useful and can even be completely wrong. 5 .

Describe a recent UX research project you were particularly challenged by and how you approached the problem.

This question should help you understand more about a UX researcher’s process. It doesn’t matter what kind of project it was or what they found difficult; what was their plan to solve the problem? There is no right or wrong way to solve a problem, but you do need a clear plan to get there.

For example—on an existing product—they may have found it challenging to define the problem. Did they collect more user-generated data to help them figure out what the problem was? This could mean using analytics to gather data or testing the design on a specific group of people in a way that makes the most sense. This could mean putting wireframes or interactive prototypes through tests with real people to either prove or disprove hypotheses, or it could mean sending a survey to a larger group of people to learn more about how well the product fits the needs of the market.

For instance, did they use remote moderated user testing or some other type of remote research to find out what users thought and come up with better design solutions?

Talked to company marketing and sales teams and C-level executives to learn more about business goals, customers, and the problem the product was meant to solve.

A UX researcher might start A/B or multivariate testing and let the data guide them until they hit a problem. They would then keep iterating until they got a good result. UX researchers love to solve problems, so the right person for the job should be excited about how they solve problems. 6 .

Since UX research is an important part of HCD (human-centered design), could you give some examples of how you’ve used HCD?

First and foremost, human-centered design is all about understanding your users. The work of a good UX researcher will help make products that work well for many people in many situations.

A seasoned UX researcher should be able to explain in more detail how they think about and do user research, which is what human-centered design is all about. When they do user research, what “lenses” do they use? These “lenses” could be focus groups, surveys, diary studies, field studies, and contextual observations.

When they talk about past projects, they should explain how they set research goals and made a research plan, as well as how they handled the organizational side of things, how they found representative users, what kinds of research questions they asked, and how they analyzed the results. While there are different ways to do user research, the designer should be able to clearly explain the method, the sample size needed to get a useful result, and how the data will be interpreted.

Look for a UX researcher who knows how to measure correctly by choosing the fewest subjects necessary to get a good understanding of the research and who knows what they are testing and trying to figure out.

Testing product designs is a vital aspect of UX research. For usability testing, the UX researcher should discuss the methodologies they used. Did they do structured, one-on-one interviews with users while they tried to do certain tasks with prototypes of the product? Ask them how they’d describe a successful test, i.e. e. , what key revelations were gathered and how the data was distilled into practical, actionable insights. Were the usability tests moderated or unmoderated? (Examples of unmoderated tests include eye-tracking, click-tracking heatmaps, online card sorting games, and more.) ) 7 .

How do you go about recruiting the right UX research participants?

It is important for UX researchers to take the time to find the right people to do user research with. The final UX research report will depend on how good the feedback sources were: the people who took part in the research.

A good UX researcher will figure out who the product’s users are (personas) and look for people who are like those users to do UX research and user testing. They should also form relationships with gatekeepers who can provide researchers with access to end users.

Pay attention to specific ways to hire people based on the type of product they may be working on, as well as ways to screen UX research participants to find the best mix. UX researchers should seek out users with varied experiences with a product.

For example, seek out users who no longer use the service or are inactive. It’s helpful to know why they stopped buying (did they switch to a different product? Do they no longer need it? Or something else?) because that can help you make the product better.

Customers who have spent much time complaining to support are also valuable. These people are usually invested in making the product better and will feel validated having their opinions heard.

It can help to see what kinds of people the company is already trying to reach by looking at where the product is being advertised (e.g., on social media, in newsletters, on certain websites or blogs). Other options could include paid surveys and UX testing platforms like usertesting. com.

There’s also the option of going “into the wild,” as in guerilla user research. If researchers were making a mobile app for grocery coupons, they might go to their local grocery store to get feedback. The more genuine the participant, the higher-quality the results will be.

In a business-to-business setting, UX researchers should think about the best way to get in touch with participants and whether they need to go through gatekeepers or can talk directly to users. Different companies will have different procedures for this.

Follow-up questions on this topic:

• How do they get in touch with people who might want to take part, and how do they run the process?
• How do they decide if and what kind of incentive to give?

8 .

What are the UX research deliverables?

A UX researcher’s job takes them to a lot of different places, from lean startups and agile settings where teams work with little documentation to consulting jobs for outside companies or government agencies that have strict documentation rules. One thing that all UX researchers need to do is be able to clearly explain their research results and the context of their projects to a variety of audiences, no matter the type of collaboration or setting.

As part of their UX research methodology, researchers will make a lot of different “artifacts” and project deliverables during the UX research process. Deliverables may take many forms because they help UX researchers communicate with various stakeholders and teams. It may be documenting the UX research, delivering reports, and providing artifacts for meetings and ideation sessions.

Some UX research deliverables include but are not limited to:

• UX research plans
• Survey analysis reports
• Consolidated interview analysis reports
• Consolidated insights from user observation research reports
• Competitor analysis reports
• Affinity maps
• Empathy maps
• User personas
• User testing plans
• Usability testing reports
• User analytics (geographic, demographic, device used, etc. data)
• Product usage analytics reports
• There may be a single UX research report that includes most of the above.

9 .

How do you distill UX research into actionable insights?

If conducting UX research is divergent thinking, then synthesizing is convergent. UX researchers may gather a lot of data, but it might not be clear what all that data means until they put it all together. Researchers take an array of data and restructure it into a handful of insights to prioritize those insights. They may use affinity maps, empathy maps, personas, problem statements, and journey maps, among other things, to put together UX research. There is no one right way to do it.

In general, pay attention to how UX researchers follow clear steps in a process as they look for themes and patterns that can help them make decisions. The goal should be to turn findings into useful information that they can share with the rest of the product and design teams after a strict process. This is a process, and each UX researcher may have a favorite way to do it based on the study they did. With each UX research method, they may employ different approaches to extract the most impactful ideas.

For example, they might be distilling a user interview series with a dozen users. Instead of just summarizing the interview, they might write it down, use Post-its to keep track of important ideas, and pick out the most important points. ).

It’s best to ask about the different methods they might use, how they distill, and how they approach each UX research project in a unique way in order to get useful information. 10 .

What tools do you use for conducting UX research?

Since UX research techniques vary, so do the tools UX researchers use. Listen for how the UX researcher describes their experience with various tools and how they use them. The user experience researcher should know how to use a wide range of tools and know when to use each one for each project.

For instance, they might use video conferencing apps like Skype, BlueJeans, or Zoom for one-on-one interviews with users, which can be done in a number of ways. These apps also let them record the interviews so they can be looked at later. They might use a small audio recording device for guerrilla-style interviews, in which a UX researcher talks to a group of random users on the spot, like at a coffee shop.

For remote user testing, they may also use the videoconferencing apps we talked about above, or they may use more advanced online tools like usertesting. com, UserZoom, Lookback, and Userbrain. Product testing sessions can be recorded with all of these tools. The participant’s desktop or mobile screen, as well as the tester’s and participant’s face and voice, can be captured.

They might use Google Forms or SurveyMonkey for user surveys, which are flexible and cheap ways to get specific information from users.

They might say that they make a lot of notes from observing things in their environment. When they are done collecting information and making an affinity map, they might use sticky notes or an online tool like Miro or DoGo Maps.

They can use paper cards or different online tools, like OptimalSort, for card sorting, a generative UX research method that lets them show how they think by having them put topics into groups that make sense to them.

For multivariate and A/B testing, they may mention Crazy Egg, Google Optimize, Optimizely, or Maxymiser.

They might use well-known tools like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics to look at how people use their websites. For accurate information about how people use their products, they might use Mixpanel or Pendo.

They may know about Hotjar, Crazy Egg, Inspectlet, Clicktale, or EyeQuant for heatmaps that track your eyes and scroll, session replays, and conversion funnels.

There is more to interviewing than tricky technical questions, so these are intended merely as a guide. Not every good candidate for the job will be able to answer all of them, and answering all of them doesn’t mean they are a good candidate. At the end of the day, hiring remains an art, a science — and a lot of work.

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