Why UX researchers need to be great educators

Our impact depends on facilitating others’ learning

by Hilary Dwyer, PhD (opens in new tab)

I found my way into UX Research after many years as an educational researcher, where my work spanned teaching, developing curricula, and understanding diverse learner needs. When I left academia, I believed my research training to be my most valuable skill. However, being a great educator has turned out to be my career superpower.  

Being a great educator means I focus both on producing research insights and finding ways for my stakeholders learn those insights. Similar to when I was teaching, I am curious about what motivates my stakeholders to learn, how they retain information, how I can build on their prior knowledge, and what experiences can activate those behaviors.  

In the following, I’ll share 3 ways being an educator made me a better researcher, and some quick teaching tricks to incorporate into your research practice. 

1) I recognized what motivates my stakeholders to learn  

Researchers are well-trained to understand the complex lived experience of customers, but often our non-researcher teammates lack the same time, training, and interest.  

Think of a subject you disliked in school – it’s challenging to feel motivated about something you’re not interested in. This is an issue that teachers manage every day: How do you excite and energize others about knowledge you possess?  

As a UX researcher, I would spend time getting to know my teammates: what were they struggling with, what did they already know about UX, and what were they curious about more generally. Knowing this helped frame the “so what” of my projects and develop new formats to share findings that built on their interests. 

2) I focused on how my stakeholders and teammates processed new ideas  

The end-goal of many UX research projects is to inform product and business decisions, which means it’s incredibly valuable to understand how stakeholders process ideas that inform their decision-making.  

Teachers recognize that students are diverse in how they process information. Most students need things said aloud to also be in writing, many engage more deeply in topics through discussion, and others need quiet time to process. Educators scaffold new ideas on existing ones and use multiple ways to share information all the time. 

As a UX researcher, everything I said aloud was also in writing, I re-iterated prior ideas often, and I focused on simplifying my key findings. As well, I adapted my delivery to the learning preferences of different stakeholders. Some did better when I scheduled a 1:1 meeting with them, others when I sent an email summary. I stayed flexible in how I met the learning needs of colleagues. 

3) I designed experiences to co-create knowledge on my team 

There are many ways to share knowledge but co-creating it with others is one of the most successful. And our our UX processes are filled with opportunities to co-create knowledge on our teams. 

Educators recognize that they are facilitators of the learning process, not experts transferring knowledge. They notice that students learn best when they have some ownership on the learning process, and when the learning is collaborative, hands-on, experiential, and enjoyable. 

As a UX researcher, I frequently experimented with ways to interact, discuss, and co-create knowledge about customers. We created walls of post-its, marked up posters, encouraged questions during readouts, etc. I also emphasized that the findings were stronger when more people participated and shared their thinking. And the more fun I made the research process, the easier it was to get teammates to engage. 

Let’s all become better educators! 

Here is a quick list of teaching behaviors you could try in the coming weeks.  

• Identify knowledge gaps in what your stakeholders understand about a customer problem space before starting a new project; 

• Identify what motivates your stakeholders so you can best explain the “so what” of your work; 
• Make the research process interactive, collaborative, and fun; 
• Facilitate experiences that get teammates to discuss new ideas, ideate, and co-create together; 
• Most people will only remember 3-5 key ideas in one presentation, so spend a lot of time making those key points accessible and clear; 
• People retain knowledge differently, so use more than one method to share your findings: emails, decks, readouts, video, 1:1 conversations. 

Most UX research is done in the service of a supporting a product or business decision. This means we are tasked not just with producing research, but also with ensuring that research is acted upon. Thinking and acting like an educator aided me immensely in doing the latter. I saw more teammates lean into the research process, talk about my research findings in meetings, and attend more readouts. Perhaps thinking like an educator can scale your impact as well! 

What do you think? How has being able to teach affected your work as a UX researcher? What ideas in this blog post would you like to put to use? Tweet us your thoughts at @MicrosoftRI or follow us on Facebook (opens in new tab) and join the conversation.