10 tips for acing your UX research job interview
Our last Ask Like A Pro cohort and alums had a great conversation about interviewing for UX research jobs. The biggest takeaway? Show your research chops by doing your research: Know the company and its products, and be able to talk about them as if you’re already on the research team. Here’s how we broke that all down. Next week we will share more tips from Julia DeBari, who recruits UXers, and spoke at our Alumni Mixer on February 7th, “Hiring Trends in UX and UXR today.”
In many ways, this is like interviewing for any other job type:
1. Research the company. Rehearse why you want to join their team, and what you specifically can offer them. Tell them if you are passionate about the industry and or have experience working on similar teams, projects, etc.
2. Research the interviewer(s), if possible. You’ll likely meet with a variety of people in an organization, including researchers, designers, product managers, developers, and or data scientists. Use your research skills to understand their culture and evolution via secondary research, study their org chart, learn about their background on LinkedIn, and ask your personal and professional contacts about them. I refer to this step as “breaking the ice” before your actual meeting. Don't walk in blind!
3. Get ready to explain your career goals. “What does the next chapter of your career look like?” or “Where do you see yourself in 5-10 years?” are common questions.
4. Relax as much as possible and think of the interviews as a conversation; you are assessing the hiring company and team as much as they are assessing you.
Some things are unique to UXR job interviews:
5. Know the company — BETTER than you would for other types of jobs. As a UX research applicant, hiring managers are going to expect that you’ve done some pretty thorough research on your own. You might be asked to choose your favorite product from the company’s offerings, formulate a problem statement about it, and propose how to conduct research to inform how to optimize the experience for X segment of their target market.
6. Know the lingo. We can tell immediately how seasoned you are by the terms you use about our industry. Learn the lingo, particularly if you’re career-switching! The terminology is always evolving. Learn the latest by visiting the UX Lex, and sign up for our free Term Tuesday emails.
7. Be ready to explain your approach to UX research. The following questions might come from a UX immature company, OR, from a UX mature org trying to gauge your cultural fit and acumen. Either way, be ready to answer questions like …
How do you respond to user research nay-sayers? Collaborate with stakeholders? [Learn more about this topic here.]
How would you choose which 12-15 customers to recruit and interview out of many thousands? Learn more about this topic in the Survey Screen workshop and here.
How do you justify your recommendations when only gathering feedback from small sample sizes?
How do you know if you gathered feedback from the right people?
What are the most common types of biases in product research? How will you mitigate them?
Why not do a mass survey instead of generative research, a moderated study, or a usability test?
What, if anything, do you know about conducting accessible research?
8. Prepare a portfolio or case study. In UX research, your portfolio is more than an opportunity to showcase your best work; it’s a way to demonstrate your critical research storytelling skills, showcase your project contributions, and share more about how you think and collaborate. (Remember, this is a portfolio presentation, not a client presentation. They are different!) Share how your work impacted the product or the team and which stakeholder roles you worked with. Explain why you chose the project for this particular interview, and how this type of study might apply to the hiring company. Establish a clear goal for the case study. For example, to demonstrate your ability to pivot quickly, collaborate with nay-sayers, build a participant pool, etc.
Prepare a short and a long version of each case study, and be ready for follow-up questions, like “What was the business need/goal? Why did you decide to do it that way? When is it not appropriate to conduct user research?” or, “What would you do differently if you have more or less time?” Learn more about presenting in our Present workshop.
9. Be ready to think on your feet. Hiring managers are interested in your reasoning skills and problem-solving approach. You may be asked seemingly obscure questions (such as What you might do if given an elephant) to test your creativity, ability to lead/coach, and the diversity of thought you might bring to the team. Sometimes even how long you take to answer tells an interviewer something about you, like whether you are more thoughtful or quick-thinking. Often it is not the response, but the approach to the response, that helps an interviewer better understand you as a candidate.
Another common exercise in UXR interviews is a “whiteboard challenge.” Here, you may be asked to lay out a rough research plan or walk through another aspect of the process. The key thing to remember is that there is no single "right" answer. The point is to guide interviewers through your approach to solving research and business problems. In that respect, it's a meta problem-solving exercise. Remember to manage your time; don’t get bogged down in any part of thinking through the exercise. Make assumptions and state them clearly. And include what you are going to do with the findings once you have them. Each step is an opportunity for you to share your philosophy on how you conduct, use, and leverage research. Whiteboard challenges are controversial. They should never be directly tied to the hiring org’s actual research or business problems and should always be time-boxed within a reasonable time frame! Again, this exercise should NOT be actionable to the hiring company. That would be unethical (and illegal) if there was no compensation offered.
Learn more about how to craft a winning research plan with stakeholder buy-in on our PLAN workshop.
10. Be ready with questions of your own! What kind of researcher doesn’t have questions? You’ll want to find out where the research team falls in the company org chart, what role research plays in their decision-making processes, what research questions they are working on now, how often they conduct research today, and which aspects of the research process work well and which could be improved. These are the types of questions that will help you ascertain the organization's UX maturity, which is critical to evaluating culture fit. Learn more about UX maturity and culture fit here.
Career resources on curiositytank.com
“Breaking Into User Research” Webinar sponsored by Design Career Network)
“What I wish I knew before starting a career in UX” (Panel discussion with six pages of resources sponsored by Curiosity Tank)
Transitioning into User Research (Delta CX) 4/19 (Interview sponsored by Delta CX)
“User Research Demystified” (Event sponsored by Adobe Experience Lab)
Other interviewing resources
Navigating Your Way into User Research (UXR) by Kassie Chaney
Your Research Career Roadmap: How to Get Started, Level Up, and Lead in UXR
What are your tips?
One of the unique things about the Curiosity Tank and the Ask Like A Pro community is the amazing range of experience our group brings … from longtime UX pros, to academic researchers and designers transitioning to UX research or who have already transitioned, to others just starting out, to friends with expertise in adjacent disciplines. Beautiful minds, all!
Congratulations to our Ask Like A Pro grads who are now conducting research at Adobe, Alibaba, Amazon, AnswerLab, Ford Motors, Google, Home Depot, Microsoft, Robinhood, Vanguard, and more.
We’d love to hear about your UXR job-hunting and interviewing tips and experiences. Drop us a line! This is the focus of our March 8th event for current students and alumni. See below for details.
Upcoming Events
Feb 16th 11 AM - 12 PM PST: Increase Your Research Efficiency, Product Management Today Event. Register here [free]
March 8 5 - 6:30pm PST: UXR Case Studies & Job Interviews (Students and Alumni only)
March 15th 5 - 6:30 PM PST: Live Info Session about Ask Like A Pro with Alumni. [free] NEW DATE!!
March 27 3-5:30pm PST: First live workshop for the Ask Like A Pro WI22 cohort.
April 7 & 14: Ask Like A Pro Data Security and Privacy Policy spotlight events [Students and alumni only]
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And that’s a wrap!
We try to alternate between a theme and UX/UXR jobs, events, classes, articles, and other happenings every few weeks. Thank you for all of the feedback. Feedback is a gift and we continue to receive very actionable input on how to make Fuel Your Curiosity more meaningful to you.
What do you think? We're constantly iterating and would love to hear your input.
Stay curious,
- Michele and the Curiosity Tank team
PS: We’re only offering two public Ask Like A Pro cohorts this year, and the next one starts in March! If you’re ready to register, click here to grab your spot! Need a little more info? Join our live info session with Alumni on March 15th at 5 pm PT to learn more.
