User Researchers at work via https://uxbooth.com/articles/ux-researchers-can-become-leaders-in-a-designers-world/
When you think of UX, or User Experience, what do you think of? There’s a good chance that your mind goes to UX Design—designing for users to ensure intuitive experiences with technology and other products. However, there is a field within UX that may be overlooked—UX Research. Sure, research and design go hand-in-hand in the field, but why is it that so much of UX seems to be about design? 🤨
In 1945, Bell Labs hired a psychologist, John E. Karlin, to help design telephone systems, leading to the design of the touch tone keypad, pioneering a new path that originated from human factors to this new idea of the “user experience”. Such starts to the emergence of UX show how its origins came from psychology, cognitive science, and similar fields of research. For example, if you have ever taken an HCI design course at CMU, you have definitely heard of Gestalt psychology—an idea created in the 1920s to understand people’s perceptions of individual elements in a whole image. Such studies are now used as fundamental theories in introductory design courses. 💡
Research was the foundation of UX, and it still is today. While UX Design focuses on a lot of the visual aspects of systems, like wireframing and prototyping, to improve users’ experience with interfaces and other products. UX Research does the initial deep digging on users’ needs and motivations. They engage in user interviews, usability testing, heuristic evaluations, and even quantitative data analysis. UX Researchers are the explorers who discover the insights that allow UX Designers to materialize those ideas into interactive systems. 🔎
So, the next time you think of UX, remember that it’s not just about design—it is also about researching to understand users at a deeper level, through the lens of psychology, cognitive science, data science, and much more.
If you are interested in learning more about the research side of UX, try taking courses like User-Centered Research and Evaluation (05-410) and Applications of Cognitive Science (05-395). HCI also offers many Special Topics courses (05-499) to study some unique aspects of the field such as Psychological Foundations for Designing for Impact in HCI, Social Data Science, and ****UX Research with Quantitative Data Sources (05-497). 🙌
Sources
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/100-years-ux/
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/gestalt-principles#what_are_the_gestalt_principles?-0
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/ux-research?srsltid=AfmBOop9mwmzcs9pjzXFHWB00GNqI1SDx_p75wDDy0cz6Tj8k4iv7LHW