r/UXResearch

Just got rejected for the 2nd recent role I've interviewed for because they're prioritizing people with experience researching Agentic AI or AI agents. I have *some* experience researching AI agents, but not a TON, because no one was adding AI agents to every damn page until recently, and they mostly sucked and needed constant rework.

It seems the only open UXR roles focus on AI features, and these companies magically want people with a ton of experience researching them + whatever industry it is.

Guess what? All the researchers on my last few teams were forced to research these new AI features with no prior experience. And now suddenly only "experts" will be considered? – the experts who were forced to learn on the job cus they didn't know anything about them before? OOKAY.

This also lets only a few already-employed folks bounce around to the only available jobs?

I'm also super disappointed that UXR hiring managers are even partaking in this extreme pickiness, which feels pathetic. I get it's rooted in fear, but my god.

Anyone else experiencing AI-related rejection? Love that I can't get more experience in it cus I can't get hired to work on it cus I don't have enough experience in it.

Long story short, I was laid off in late summer, and after almost 500 applications later, I have a job offer. It is for substantially less money than my previous role, but some income is better than no income. The only quirk is that it is not a UXR role, but a position that sits more as a "CX and Insights" specialist. Will holding this job (for a short or long amount of time) dilute my branding in the future when I wish to apply for UXR work again in the future?

TL;DR: I loved being a researcher. I think it’s the best job ever, at least for me. But the profession has problems, and my particular job had problems. So I quit and started building a cabin on an off-grid property. I love it, and it looks like early (age 47) retirement.

 

The lead-up

I got lucky and went through a great grad school. Then I happened to land in education research, program evaluation, educational gaming, platform research in gaming (FAANGish), and then B2B platform research in telecom. TBH, the gaming job was fantastic, but I left when my boss marginalized me because, as I learned later, they worried that I’d upset any of the many executives who could have blocked their giant pending promotion.

 

Taking on the challenge

I went to the telecom company to work under leadership that had no appetite for focusing on users and the company’s long-term profitability. Instead, they were preoccupied with internal political schemes and struggles. The users’ needs were inconvenient. My skip-level boss blatantly falsified my research. Nobody within my management chain knew what UX research was, etc. I signed on for a challenge, and I took it on, 100%, every day. I tried my hardest.

 

I had some big wins. Those came from aligning myself with the good people (e.g., one design director who was also battling headwinds) and following my curiosity and the evidence into new channels of thinking that produced huge projects that could help the company in the long run.

 

Stuck

But those long-term, hard-fought wins were overshadowed by the daily indignities of working in a culture that was toxic from the top (e.g., CEO making national news for toxic company-wide comms) down (e.g., my boss making every one of my colleagues cry somewhat regularly). And I only won by doing work in secret – side campaigns that leadership would have killed if they had known, but which, when done, leadership showed their leaders as their own successes. When hired, I worked remotely, but then I had to report 3x/week to a local office, and then that office closed, and I was stuck with a long commute to a soul-crushing cubicle farm where they logged my badge activity to ensure I was there full time. I prayed the layoffs would hit me.

 

I looked for a new job for, literally, over two years. At times, I only applied for jobs at my same level. Sometimes I applied for some well below my level. I failed out at the end of several hiring processes. Some of the jobs were the stuff of dreams, and many sounded perhaps as bad as mine. I read so many comments on this subreddit that seemed to echo my sentiment that The Man had gone belligerent, no longer cared what the customer wanted, and was spending all the money on AI server farms. But I felt like I was being a productive member of society, and I pitied the version of myself that would go on to quit and be irrelevant. Due to my upbringing, I had the need to feel relevant and keep working hard.

 

Cynicism

Overall, I felt like a representative for the truth, logic, and evidence in an environment that would have none of that. I became overwhelmed with projects that made no sense, and I could no longer fend them off. I outsourced much of the work to my AI tools, which was great for leadership but not the user. I became a sort of manager of dumb tools that did mediocre work that looked good to leadership. AI took all the interesting tasks, and I didn’t really even understand the details of the methodology it been chosen (e.g., nature of stat tests used). Frankly, I didn’t trust the assertions that the AI was making in my findings, but this was all what management wanted, and it was good enough for who it was for. (Yeah, I was feeling cynical.) (BTW, AI had no part in writing this post. This is all me.)

 

When I went home in the evenings, I read the news – about corporations ripping off consumers, enshittification, and so on, as well as national politics, which, IMO, is also about enshittification. Specifically, I think enshittification is the wrong term, because, from my experience working for corporations, it’s actually making the product far better for the most important party – the short-term investor, the CEO looking for the annual bonus, etc. It’s simple: Take over a product that has value for consumers, and then continue charging them full price while hollowing out the product and reaping short-term rewards – sticking it to the customer. It’s not a failure – it’s optimization of the efficiency with which people in power can separate the common people from their money or their freedom.

 

To me, those are the headwinds for a UX researcher trying to improve things. And, for many of us, it’s not just our jobs, but our chosen …identity.

 

Escape

With encouragement from former colleagues, I did the selfish thing. I told the good design director that I was going to quit unless he hired me. That started an internal negotiation that lasted for weeks. I wrapped up my last projects and tied everything else up. Then I started building a cabin (where there’s no cell service). I continued supporting my colleagues and clients, and I occasionally pinged leadership about the transfer, but I was 95% gone. This went on for about a month until the transfer was found to be impossible do to competition for requisition numbers. Ultimately, my skip-level boss offered me another slot on the old team that smelled suspicious – it was framed as reporting to the good manager, but it was clearly for the old manager. So I gave two weeks’ notice and continued working on the cabin.

 

The second day working at the cabin site, it was hot. I was covered in sweat and mud, kneeling in the dirt and digging out rocks with my hands. The commute was terrible. I was covered in mosquitoes. I ate lunch in a plastic chair under the trees. And it was the best fucking day I’ve had in years. There’s no way I would trade that for an air-conditioned cubicle on a toxic team.

 

There have been bumps. This new thing is challenging. I’m learning I have to take time to relax, write stuff (e.g., I now Instagram), plan the cabin, go play, etc. It turns out that when I apply myself fully to, for a change, something I truly love, I can work myself to death. I don’t know if I’ll still love this lifestyle in a year, ten years. But I’m sooo much happier right now and, frankly, easier to be around.

 

The future

I had saved up enough to retire, but I thought I’d go back when a job came along (I worried that maybe I’d get dumber because UXRs are the smartest). Now, two months later, I kinda doubt it. I think I might finish up this cabin for myself and then build or renovate other cabins for other people. There’s a certain permanence to vacation cabins. People make formative memories there that they keep for lifetimes. In a way, they live so much within people over their lifetimes that they transcend their physical structure. That’s what I want to associate myself with. Helping other people to get their hands into the dirt and to form bonds with one another.

 

That was a lot. I share because I expect everyone reading this far can find a common thread here. Hopefully it helps you think through your own choices and paths. Thanks for reading, and thanks for the support and collab over the years, UXResearch subreddit.

Hi all, I recently finished my MS in HCI, and I'm starting to look for junior UXR and adjacent roles in the Bay Area, mainly temp agency contract work. I know the market is especially bad for junior candidates, so I'd appreciate advice from people who've been through it or who hire, because I'm still feeling a bit lost as to my strategy.

Here's a bit of background:

- 3 years of qual research experience across undergrad and grad school, including my dissertation.

- A bit of design experience alongside research

- No industry internship

What I've done so far:

- Built a minimalist Framer portfolio with two UXR case studies that try to focus on decisions and outcomes. (still working on mobile)

- Created an ATS-compatible resume that tries to emphasize the impact of my work.

- Starting to apply for temp contract roles, as I've heard it might be somewhat easier to get my foot in the door.

- Keeping an eye out for roles that seem to value UXR skill sets without it being the title or differing in scope. (CX, Associate PM sometimes).

Some stuff I'd love to know:

- Is contract work really that much easier to get in as a junior, or is that really oversaturated too?

- Is there anything Bay Area-specific I should know about? Networking events, staffing firms I should check into, or anything else?

- And if you're a hiring manager, what would make you pick one junior candidate over another?

Or anything else you think would be helpful to know or change, really. Thanks guys!

Hi all,

I am doing a small side project interviewing people about how they use AI in everyday life (or don't). It's 20-minute video calls, anonymous, about 30 people.

I've never done interviews like this before. I would love any advice on:

• getting people to open up and give real examples
• what to do when someone gives short answers
• how you capture and organise what people say afterwards

Thank you so much! 😄

I have a quick question regarding project documentation and workflow for junior roles.

How important is it to independently structure and document the entire project process (e.g., problem statements, research notes, and audit findings in Google Docs or Notion) before jumping straight into Figma? Do recruiters and hiring managers look closely at those raw working docs, or do they primarily focus on the final case study presented in the portfolio?

To clarify: I always write all my notes, analysis, and reasoning myself to practice my English and UX logic. My question is specifically about the visual formatting side—like spending extra time tweaking headings, bold text, layout spacing, and tables in Google Docs.

Does manually polishing the visual aesthetics of internal working documents actually carry weight with hiring managers, or do they only care about having a clear, logical, and well-thought-out structure?

Hello,

I am looking for a multiple choice type survey that allows people taking the survey to add options for others to select as well alongside the pre laid out options that I would put in there. Something like me putting in 3-4 options that I would create and then letting people submit their choices should their choices differ and the other participants taking the survey could select from those as well.

Thanks!

I’m a staff UX researcher and I’m tired for a lot of the same reasons people post on here.

I love design (in a past life I did design stuff, just not UX design). I’m trying to pivot into Service or UX Design or to at least have that be part of the work I do.

For folks who went from doing exclusively UX research and now do, or are, Service or UX Designers, how did you do it?

Did you take any classes? Did you have a design mentor at work? Did your work allow you to shadow designers/take on design work? And what sort of challenges did you face? What advice would you give to someone pivoting?

How is the process? What might be the under rocks? I want to switch career to UX and thinking of games or product designer.

[I don't like the way I worded that title - what wins have you had getting business leaders to pay attention to the UX needs of clients?]

Due to some reorg, I've got new business stakeholders who are a lot more accessible than my past ones were, but they are entirely focused on cleaning up backend service inefficiencies (rightly so) and generally dismissive of UX concerns.. (yet they also sound all the alarms when a purchase decider complains about things that actually make sense, but they don't like)

I've got some ideas, but I know the B2B brain-trust here has climbed this mountain many times.

What was a big win for you in terms of opening that door and in terms of getting them on board with your UX roadmap / strategy advances?

Just wrapped 18 interviews with HR admins about our onboarding module. I ran a remote affinity mapping session with the PM, the eng lead and our VP of sales because I wanted buy in on the findings, not just a deck.
It went sideways. The VP kept dragging notes into a cluster he named needs better integrations, which is his existing pitch. Some of those notes were about integrations. A lot were about confusing permissions, which is a very different problem.
Nobody pushed back because he's senior. The final clusters look more like his roadmap than what 18 admins told us.
For researchers who run synthesis with stakeholders, how do you keep it honest without making people feel excluded from the process?