short question

if an expert user's time per task is 15 seconds, and im somehow able to lower a first time user's time from 3 minutes to 1 minute and 50 seconds, is that considered a successful design? if not, what number is considered "successful"?

details

im a grahic designer and it's my first time trying out user testing and im feeling a bit overwhelmed 😅

im trying to conduct a very simple user test of an app. im planning on measuring how long it takes for a first time user to complete tasks in an app and comparing their task times to expert users.

i'll be making an app prototype based on what i find and comparing first time users' task times using the old app vs my prototype.

ideally, i'd like their task time using my prototype to be as fast as that of an expert user; but realistically i know i can improve their task times but not get them to expert user level.

I have just completed a personal UX research project on player retention in Helldivers 2, a live-service co-op shooter where ongoing balance and monetization changes make retention the central design problem. The method is three sources, run in sequence and triangulated: thematic analysis of 1,143 Reddit comments coded into 19 themes, six semi-structured interviews, and three observations of high-skill gameplay via livestream. The limits are named directly in the report.

Some context on where I'm coming from: my degree is in anthropology, so the qualitative side of this is familiar ground, but I have no formal UX training. Everything here is built on free courses, my own reading, and trial and error. I'm working toward a transition into games UX research and wanted to find out if I could actually do the work before claiming I could.

Method critique is especially welcome, particularly on recruitment. Six interviews from a personal network is a real limit, and I'd want to hear how a more experienced researcher would have handled the same constraint. Anything else you'd push back on or read differently, I want to hear it too.

Slides, raw data, interview and observation notes, and full write-ups are all here: Helldivers 2 Complete UX Project

I am currently looking for a tool to run an unmoderated usability test, with a bit of complexity involved:

• Participants access the study through one shared link, all are randomly assigned to one of three groups, each group sees a different prototype, but completes identical tasks.
• Part of the study includes two blocks of questions (topic A, topic B).
  • These two blocks need to be shown in a random order.
  • Questions within each block also need to be shown in a random order. (Each question should appear on a separate page.)

Do you know any tool that can support such setups?

Hi all,

I’ve recently started a new job where I’m the research lead across a few different products.

I have done this many times - meeting PMs for the first time, having casual to very structured chats. Most times, things are amazing and UX and Product make beautiful things together. Occasionally, the convos have gone well, but led into horrible problems down the line.

Would love to hear from the community: When having these intro chats with product partners, what are questions that you MUST ask in order to kickstart a positive, respectful, and collaborative relationship with product?

Senior UX Researcher, 7+ years exp, based in Barcelona, mix of qual/quant, background in banking and hardware. Returning to job market after maternity leave. How's the market in Europe right now? Any tips for positioning?

While I am grateful to be employed at a company where I am valued, compensated, and given a nice title (Staff or Lead), the work is far beneath what my peers at this level are doing. Most of my work has been:

- Summative research on Salesforce products (usability testing)

- Integrating UX Design and Research into the product development lifecycle (getting them to build and test prototypes instead of testing on fully baked dev work)

- Improving formative research and requirements gathering (mostly for BAs)

- One complex formative study focused on fraud and security with recommendations that did not make it into the product due to context collapse

I feel like, vs my other roles in fortune 500 companies, this new job (which is a small consulting company in the public health space) has actually set me back. I am not working on anything of material value besides Design & Research management & ops. In the interim, I have decided to pursue a Masters degree, which I'm grateful for as it has helped me to do more challenging work and learn design (edited) skills I have applied to projects where I oversee both UXR and UXD but, again, this is really just inching teams toward a more mature product design model.

As I apply for jobs at the senior IC roles, I am not sure if it makes sense to omit or minimize my current role, which I have been in for just over a year. Would it be better to have a gap but more immediately relevant work experience? Is this just a growing pain of moving into more management work making me uncomfortable?

I have also considered roles at the management level but have no direct reports. I have led work for UXR & UXD but those were 1-6 people at most.

I'm just so depressed and anxious about this weird space I'm in. I also am facing a lot of imposter syndrome due to a previous manager and toxic workplace where I received high ratings from engineering, product, and design but absolutely berated by my manager.

Sorry this is a bit rambling. I know we all look for professional and concise summaries in these questions because of our professional training but I just need to let it all out.

Thanks for any practical advice, tips, or encouragement.

A former colleague used research I did, put my work in their portfolio, and was hired for a pretty fancy role (think FAANG adjacent). I found their portfolio online and was shocked - they put my work as their primary case study! The graphs, language, and outcomes were the same. This was a project I did independently that they were not involved in. It looked like they saved one of my reports and just redesigned it for their portfolio.

There's no point to this post besides the fact that I'm frustrated, and I've never hoped for someone to get fired or laid off, but I won't be sad for them if it happens.

stuck on which AI synthesis platform holds up for a b2b SaaS research team without flattening everything into one schema.

we ingest user interviews from Dovetail, support tickets from Zendesk, and quarterly NPS open-text into fragmented dashboards, synthesis ends up researcher-by-researcher rather than one coherent picture.

shortlist is Dovetail for the research layer, Marvin for AI synthesis, and BuildBetter for cross-source coverage.

specifically trying to evaluate clustering accuracy when you mix interview transcripts with high-volume short-text survey responses, whether tagging stays consistent across researchers without manual taxonomy upkeep, integration with our Linear roadmap so themes flow from research to PMs, and pricing at researcher headcount since per-seat math gets ugly once you cross 8 researchers.

if youve run mixed-method synthesis at a research team of 6+ in b2b saas, which platforms held up and which collapsed once the input mix got messy?

thank you

Hey everyone,
I’ll keep it real — I was laid off from my UX Research position last month, and while it stings, I’m also seeing it as a rare opportunity to reset and think bigger.
A little about me: I have a background in Industrial Design (BS) and Psychology (MS), and I’ve spent 15 years in tech working across research, design strategy, and human behavior. I’ve always been most energized at the intersection of people, systems, and meaning — which is probably why UXR felt like home for so long.
Right now, I’m not just looking for the next job — I’m curious about building something new, whether that’s a studio, a product, a consultancy, or just a really interesting conversation that leads somewhere unexpected.
If you’re someone who:
• Is navigating a similar transition
• Has ideas you’ve been sitting on
• Wants to think out loud with someone who gets both the research and design sides
• Is just down to connect with a curious person
…I’d love to hear from you. Drop a comment or send me a DM.
No agenda, just good conversation for now. Let’s see where it goes.

Hi everyone!

I really find the concept of UX research interesting and I would like to venture into it, but I'm not entirely sure how to. For context, I did an undergraduate degree in BA Psychology, political science and public administration. I did a summer internship at a big investment bank MNC and got placed for a full time role in HR. I worked there for two years and recently resigned because I realised the work was not for me and I faced a lot of personal issues due to a supremely toxic environment. I studied psychology because I liked it and I realised I still want to pursue a related career where I get to use some of my learnings in real time. My HR job was purely operational and did not allow that.

I want to do my masters sometime next year and I was researching on possible career paths in psychology that are not too academic which is when I stumbled across ux research. I really wanna know if there's certain masters courses that are more advantageous than the others in terms of getting placed better while also not fully restricting my scope of learning. It would be great if anyone in this field with a transition from psychology to UX research can help me understand what kind of a master's degree I can do and how your experience has been in this field.

Is UXR feasible as a U.S. remote worker staying in the Philippines? I’m now neck deep with AI convincing me that it’s possible and created a 90 day launch plan towards UXR based on feedback about my work history. I have no prior experience in UX. For the past 9 years I was in the film industry in Los Angeles working hands-on in the Art Department holding various roles including Art Director. Although I do have an Industrial Design degree from 2014, I’m familiar with UX in general.

Market has been bad and it’s likely going to get worse for UXR and many of us will also be replaced with AI. I’ve been thinking of what I should do after, something completely different or in adjacent roles? I’m thinking of working in elementary school.
Curious if others have thought about this and want to share.

Traditional research is still the gold standard for high-stakes decisions and deep ethnographic work. That is not changing. However, the problem is that most decisions never get researched at all because traditional methods cost $5,000 to $30,000 and take weeks.

The real comparison often is not AI vs. human, it is AI research vs. no research at all.

I have been testing a few platforms in this space, including Synthetic Users, Outset, and Articos. The interesting development is that some tools are moving away from simple LLM roleplay and toward behavioural science frameworks like Big Five personality modeling and bias controls.

Articos stands out because they actually published a peer-reviewed study showing 86% accuracy against established NNg and Baymard benchmarks.

Human validation is still essential, but for the 90% of decisions that currently get zero research, these synthetic approaches seem like a solid middle ground. Has anyone else integrated these into their workflow?

Founding UX at a major company.

Fight me, I'm out to start some trouble. I have seemingly successfully negotiated my way into founding the in house UX branch of a major company which has traditionally only leveraged UX as vendors or seemingly low maturity UX/UI engineers (also frankly mostly vendors).

I'm absolutely pumped out of my mind. I've been working in UXR for over 10 years from start-ups to FAANG and then down to mid-sized 100-500mil annual rev companies. I've commonly found myself in situations where I've reported to directors of design most commonly with product being the biggest customer/funder.

I've always been very impact and business case minded. In my historical roles I've always typically been a high performer, a fixer of failed ux relationships, a transformationalist, and someone who's very business case aware. However, I legitimately feel like that impact me or my team would do would basically die in the dark at the end of the year. Design owned the cadence relationships with executive leadership, design directly reported to C level, and frankly it seemed like they took the lion's share of all credit and funding from UXR. Assuming the best intentions, they tried to market it and failed to be an effective middleman, or at worst they were interested in their own development first.

When the money rolled down hill end of year for bonuses or team expansion, irrelevant of if my team had exponentially blown away velocity, product impact, business impact, and/or strategy leadership. The evaluative documents were all the sourced impact to metrics backed by jira tickets, decks, leading and lagging indicators, profit, and waste reduction. Specific financial impact you didn't need to calculate the math on, it was already done and sourced but had to correlation to team funding. Instead, it was, "c-level" earmarked this for design, here's what design earmarked for UXR. You're a boiler plate high performer, here's an irrelevant % based on total company performance divided by the ux team with an irrelevant performance band financially less than a month of being an uber gig side hustle. Head count recs? We will cherry pick that first, promotions go to my RL local friends, chao.

I personally think a big part of that has been this legacy mentality that UX Design gets introduced first and you *have to have more of them*. However, I've always been a skeptic of this, and I've always felt that senior UX research leadership is better positioned for this because we are typically closer to the business cases, the strategy work, and often the literal insights team. So, when my noncompete was positioned to roll off at the start of this month I made the play. I targeted the executive branch of the largest tech company to compete adjacent for what they do to my last company and leveraged my reputation and the fact that I was the senior most expert in our field (Rarely will there be an posted role for this sort of thing, so you got to make the relationship play). I started with the industry mastery pitch cold email. I then got tagged to a company exec.

The first meeting, I pitched industry mastery and modeled it for 30 min. The second meeting (Was an hour, went long at an hour and a half), I modeled how I thought their development pipeline looked externally in a whiteboarding workshop and they filled in the gaps. I then had pre prepped how to fill that gap with ux in a series of lean bets tailored to their location, ecosystem of talent, company culture, and finances I could deduce from public info. I built a case around decision confidence, velocity, and organizational maturity. That seemed to have already won it for me but during my third round which went another hour and a half I also modeled the evolution of UX over time in the era of AI.

AAaand i got it.

All I want to say, is that I want this win so bad for us and i needed to climb on top of a building and shout about it mostly anonymously because its early. I want to nock this out of the park for team UX Research. My dream is to show UX Research leadership can and should be the function driver with direct access to sell itself to the executive leadership. My plans to go move to their executive leadership hub and relationship build like a monster while I hopefully scale this in a series of lean bets using case study success to sell across functions.

I just launched my WIP portfolio and Cloudflare had an easy-to-implement email OTP option to protect my portfolio (enter an email, receive a PIN via email, enter PIN). Definitely more secure, but also more friction. Interstitial is Cloudflare branded.

What are yalls thoughts?

Spend more time implementing a generic password (not an out of the box feature on Cloudflare) or just keep the email OTP?

I have been meaning to run usability study for a few specific flows in my startup's products. Last I did such studies was in faang job where all the operations were handled by internal teams, so I'm not familiar with what products are out there.

I was hoping that I could run an AI driven one before a real users one which requires more upfront work. Are there any tools that you recommend for it?

Hey all! I am new to the UX world. I have just started some courses for certification in UX Design. I am working on my Capstone Portfolio project and need to get a lil research done to create this app for my project, and this would require me to make a quick survey and have people volunteer to participate.

If you guys can please give me some insight on where I might post this survey, I would be so grateful!!

Thank you!

I’m currently a Senior UXR at a Fortune 500. I’m mixed methods on paper and have a social and data science background. I’m comfortable with R and Python and I can survive in SQL. I don’t like doing survey research (sorry if I offend the survey methodologists here!). I can do it just fine, but in comparison to qual research, I find it harder to manage expectations. We don’t have access to a survey panel so getting a sufficient sample size is tough and “directional” insights are not enough. Sure, I can interview 10 people and feel confident in those insights. I can’t say the same for a quick survey. I just find survey research to be risky given all the constraints of my role.

Are there quant UXRs that don’t do survey work? For survey UXRs, how do you push back on survey requests that you know would yield bad insights? I’ve been interested in behavioral log analyses but I don’t hear UXRs talking about it.