I published a poll on LinkedIn that asked, “Is a UX researcher a type of designer or a member of their own UX research discipline?” The results indicated that 65% of respondents believed UX research to be it’s own discipline but fully 35% still consider UX research to be a sub-discipline of design. A total of 921 people voted so it’s a reasonable enough sample.
Several people commented on the survey outcome suggesting that most of the people indicating that they believe UX researchers are a type of designer may be designers themselves and that the alternative that UX research is its own discipline likely mostly came from UX researchers. LinkedIn does give the poll author the ability to see who voted for which alternative but it doesn’t provide any further analytical tools. I did a random spot sampling of 60 responses (checking their response and their LinkedIn profile role identification) and found that the suspicion was largely confirmed, that designers believe that researchers are designers whereas researchers considered themselves to be a member of the UX research discipline separate from design.
Why would designers think that UX research should be a sub-discipline of design you might ask? I think a quick look at design school curricula shows that while most don’t cover research methods at all or barely, some schools do touch on them typically in one course, albeit superficially. Designers may think that the brief introduction they were given to research in their programs is sufficient to be considered a UX researcher when carrying out research activities. However, that level of knowledge is insufficient given the sophistication of today’s UX research methods and analyses.
I was talking to a designer the other day who had this view and used to assume that doing what she understood to be research as a designer was equivalent to what a UX researcher would do. However, she then started working with a dedicated UX research team and was absolutely blown away by the wide range and rigor of research methods when practiced by trained researchers. This may be similar to the education of physicians who typically get one class on nutrition and then confidently provide what is often uninformed and quite frankly bad nutritional advice.
Design as a sub-discipline of computer science
It’s interesting to look into the history of Human-Computer Interaction as a discipline. It started as a sub-discipline of computer science in the 1980s. When I started my career some 35 years go, design was considered to be something that developers did in addition to coding a product. However, few today would think that design is a sub-discipline of computer science and the purview of developers. Design has come into its own as a discipline. We now commonly refer to “three-in-a-box” when thinking about the disciplines key to product development—that is design, product management, and development. So times have changed.
UX Research as its own discipline
I’d like to posit that it is time that UX research be recognized as a distinct discipline separate from design and that we should be referring to “four-in-a-box” when referring to the core disciplines.
Let’s explore how UX research is different from design.
Designers are creators, UX Researchers are not
People often say that UX Researchers are just like the other sub-disciplines of design such as visual design, UX design, content design, motion design, etc. However, all of those sub-disciplines of design are creators, they create part of the solution that users end up seeing and using. That’s why they’re designers. UX Researchers though aren’t creators nor designers because nothing that they do is seen or used by the user directly.
Researchers use a toolkit of rigorous methods more similar to what you would see in a scientific research lab at a university than anything you’ll see in a design school. Researchers typically have a degree, often a PhD, in UX Research from one of the iSchools or they have a high level degree in an adjacent discipline like Psychology, Anthropology, or Sociology. Those disciplines have virtually nothing to do with design and have everything to do with structured observation, conducting experiments, collecting data, synthesizing data, statistically analyzing data, visualizing data, and making recommendations on the basis of data.
Dangers of UX Researchers being seen as Designers
An example which may seem frivolous but is quite real is the situation where a UX researcher is asked to make a presentation look good because they’re considered to be a designer. There is nothing in a typical UX researcher’s education that would provide them with the skills to make a beautiful presentation deck. They’re not creators of visuals, user experience flow, or content or words. Requesters are often sadly disappointed.
Another more serious example involves a team that I’m aware of which was formed to create a new product. The product managers organized a strategy workshopping meeting and invited representatives from design, product management, and development, essentially the 3-in-a-box set of disciplines. The researchers weren’t invited. When the product managers realized that UX research wasn’t the same as design and in fact that UX researchers were the discipline that they most needed to carry out the generative research critical to and a prerequisite of even conceptualizing the product, the whole situation changed. But it was an erroneous assumption that research was part of the design discipline that caused the misstep that could have been disastrous if it wasn’t corrected.
Other dangers of researchers being considered to be designers include that they likely won’t be in their own organization, won’t have discipline specific managers, and/or won’t have a career path respecting their unique skills and career development needs. The outcome of this could be researchers leaving an organization in search of ones who acknowledge the distinction of UX research as it’s own discipline.
The lack of recognition of UX research as it’s own discipline has also resulted in very few degree programs in universities devoted to it. There are programs in what are called iSchools which came about during the .com boom out of Library Science programs (the “i” in iSchool is information). The heavy lifting is left to companies to hire graduates of Psychology, Anthropology, and Sociology programs and then provide the additional requisite education to level up the knowledge and skills required to develop exemplary UX researchers. Compare that to companies hiring visual designers. They typically have virtually all of the knowledge and skills they need directly from their design school education.
Should UX Research be the sole purview of researchers?
Emphatically no. All disciplines on a team have to have a UX research mindset and know the basics of UX research so that they don’t do things like asking leading questions during conversations with clients/users, not be aware of needing to guard against biases especially when talking about their product or project, and they don’t only work with one client/user and think that is sufficient. Those are a bit extreme but I’ve witnessed non-researchers making those errors.
So, everyone should have a basic grounding in a research mindset and some knowledge of basic practices but a team needs a sufficient number of trained researchers as well to do the well-planned, rigorous, and impactful research. It’s like when we talk about design thinking. Everyone on the team should know how to do the basics of design thinking but that doesn’t make them a designer. You need designers to do the design and researchers to do the core research. Everyone on the team needs to have an appreciation and some skills that other members of the team have (the horizontal stroke of the T) but every team member needs to have a deep specialization or superpower too (the vertical stroke of the T).
I was talking to a product manager the other day who thought that UX research was simply doing usability studies. However, when he saw the work of some real researchers who had done a Kano study, a Conjoint analysis, and all the histograms in their presentation indicated which bars were statistically significant, he was taken aback with what this discipline can do and what impact researchers can have that nobody else on the team has the expertise to do.
The assumption of UX research being a sub-discipline of design often leads people to assume that research equates to doing usability studies which do require a close collaboration with design but are often the least powerful types of research. Generative research is often the most powerful, valuable, and impactful type of research which also requires close collaboration with product management and less so design but people don’t think of it being within the purview of UX research because they make the erroneous assumption that UX researchers are just a type of designer.
Where do we go from here?
I don’t think we researchers should just shout “UX researchers are not designers” from the roof tops. A little of that will help, like I hope that this blog post will. However, the real change will happen by educating teams on the contribution of research, how to work with researchers, and then doing awesome, rigorous, and impactful UX research and sharing it widely. In other words, I think researchers should set the context and then earn the right to have our discipline be recognized as a distinct discipline.
Am I annoyed when only design and designers are referred to and the assumption is, “oh, but we mean researchers too”? I sure am. It’s like being annoyed when only male pronouns are used and being told, “oh, but we mean women too”. But the exclusion of mentioning UX research and UX researchers strengthens my resolve to make UX research the most central and essential discipline to make products, services, and companies successful. And, to not be quiet about the contributions we make.