r/UXResearch

I’m at a bit of a career crossroads and would really appreciate some perspective from people working in UX/HCI, particularly those who have made a significant career pivot.

My background is in biochemistry, and I’ve spent the last few years working in life-science/biotech roles, including research and laboratory-based work. More recently, I’ve moved into customer success at a software company that develops software for the life sciences. Customer success is not where I see my long term development. I’m based in Europe. I’m 27.

Interestingly, I’m now seeing a potential path into UI/UX within my company, particularly because I have the scientific domain knowledge. I’m considering starting to study HCI alongside working part-time as I have a place on a masters program already, with the longer-term idea of moving into UX/product design within scientific software.

On paper, this seems like a really interesting combination: life sciences + software + HCI/UX. I could potentially work in a fairly specialised niche where my existing scientific background is actually useful rather than starting completely from scratch.

But I’m having a lot of anxiety about the long-term career implications of making such a big pivot.

I’m essentially deciding between three broad directions:
Continue further into science — potentially returning to a lab/research role or doing a scientific PhD which has a 50/50 lab/computational focus.

Stay in scientific software, potentially moving from customer success into a UX/UI or product-focused role, therefore committing more fully to HCI/UX, with the goal of building a career in UX/product design, ideally within life sciences or scientific software.

The thing I’m struggling with is that I’m not sure whether I’m looking at a genuinely promising niche or convincing myself that this career path could work out.

I also worry about the opportunity cost. I have a fairly solid baseline scientific background already, whereas moving into UX would mean investing time studying and money (going part time to keep studying for 2 years) into a new field where I’d initially have much less experience. At the same time, I’m not sure I actually want to spend the next 10–20 years doing traditional scientific/laboratory work.

For people working in UX/HCI:
Does this sound like a sensible career pivot? How valuable is domain expertise in a field like life sciences when moving into UX/product design?

And for anyone who has moved from science into UX/product/software (or vice versa), how has the career progression and job security compared with what you expected?

I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who work in healthcare, biotech, scientific software, medical technology, or other specialised technical domains, rather than generic UX advice.

I realise nobody can predict where the job market will be in 10 years — I’m more interested in whether this combination of skills is something you’d consider a strong long-term career direction, or whether you’d recommend keeping the door open to a more traditional scientific career.

We’ve got users in a bunch of different countries already, but I’m realizing that actually finding the right people to interview in each market is kind of a pain lol.

Reaching out to existing users is one thing, but finding new people (or potential users) in a specific country feels way harder than I expected.

For anyone who’s done this before
where did you actually find people?

Reddit? Discord? Facebook groups? Paid research platforms? Ads? Cold outreach?

Also, did offering an incentive actually make a noticeable difference?

Curious what’s actually worked for people here, especially for B2C/mobile apps.

I’ve been doing research on other roles that a UXR can pivot into within tech and wouldn’t require a ton of retraining/education. I’m curious if anyone else has made the pivot to one of these roles or is also considering it?

- Presales (this seems like half discovery research)
- CS (still talking to customers but doing a bit more problem solving)
- PM (probably the most natural pivot but the hardest to break into)
- Product Ops
- Product Strategy

As much as I would love to be a UXR forever I think it important to be realistic about the current job market.

As many are seeing or experiencing themselves, the state of UX, especially research, is in a really tough place.

I was affected by a large round of layoffs at the end of 2025 and have been on the job hunt ever since. I have about 5 years of experience leading mixed methods research with MAANG, financial services, and social media teams from the agency side. I have a Masters in HCI. I lean more qual with light quant and have thought about trying to shift more into SQL, R, or Python as that is where the market has felt it is going but still looks shaky.

I have been applying and interviewing for months, either never getting a response to applications or making it into final rounds of interviews. At this point I am nearing a year of this job search and genuinely do not know what to do. I’m getting signals it is still possible with these late stage cycles but this market is devastating.

I have truly loved the impact that I’ve made through user research and the experience I’ve developed, but it sometimes feels like I’m going down with the ship in this field.

So I’m looking for advice: at what point do I make a pivot out of UXR? How long do I try to stay in this?

If I stay in UXR, how should I approach this search?

If I shift out, what translatable fields would be my best best?

I have this short snippet downloaded but cannot remember where I got it. I love it and would like to attribute it: "Interviewer: Say that you decide that you're going to conduct maybe eight interviews over the course of a couple weeks.

I'd like to better understand your preparation process.

How much are you trying to standardize those conversations and what are you doing to get

the most out of that time with a user of your product?

Speaker:  So let's touch upon that standardization question first.

I think one thing that's very important with interviews is that we don't want to have an

interview script ever.

We want to have an interview guide and there's a very particular reason why we don't want

to over standardize our interviews and that is that, and I've written an article about

this once, is that the magic moment in interviews or moments is always in the follow up question.

That's where the magic lies.

And those follow up questions, by the way, are never in your interview guide and they're

certainly not in an interview script, which is overly standardized.

Those are questions that come up organically because of the responses that you got and

because you were listening to the person you're talking to.

So first of all, we don't want to over standardize our interview.

Second of all, it always comes back to the goals that we have"

I'm a Psychology + HR Management major in my final year. I've been learning UX/UI design on the side through Coursera for the past 4–6 months.

I've really enjoyed both the research and design aspects.

However, after reading through a lot of threads and talking to people in the industry, I've become concerned about how competitive the UX/UI market has become.

I'd like to know from people actually working in the field: between UX Design and UX Research, which do you think has better opportunities now and over the next 5–10 years?

I want to start specializing soon, so any honest advice would be really appreciated.

(Ps: This is mainly a Plan B for me and something I'm doing because I genuinely enjoy it, so I'm not necessarily looking to rush into the field )

I saw a job description for a UX Designer where one of the requirements were SQL, R, and Python. They also asked for qualitative research experience, too, plus the ability to create design systems.

And it’s crazy to me because those could be THREE different jobs. Three! I’m a UXR with very strong design skills, so I hop back and forth, but it’s these job postings are wild. In my opinion, I’d only apply for something like this if it was offering 200K+ 🙄—out of their minds.

i recently graduated with an MS in psychology from a US university, which was, unfortunately, not stem. i’m leaning towards UX research and design as a field as academia is not for me for now. i need some career advice on this general transition, and how i can land an internship/entry level job/fellowship/ any experience. i’ve been applying to roles for a month but nothing is turning up.

this is what i’ve done till now:
- tailor my resume for jobs
- follow UX UI folks on linkedin (i don’t have premium so i can’t send most of them messages)

any helpful career advice that can help a newcomer to this field? are the certifications necessary to do (as they are a bit expensive)

Hey all, wanted to post this here, cus most of my friends either 1) don't work in tech or 2) if they do, it's in marketing, and so I feel like I'm having a hard time understanding what it's been like in my own personal field applying for jobs.

For context, I've been a UXR for 7 years, more recently in Senior/Staff/Lead roles, do NOT have a Master's or PhD (which I suspect is also working against me in these times), and also worked at big tech companies including Google.

I've been applying on and off for the last 6 months for full-time Senior/Lead UXR jobs, and in my experience it feels like:

1. There are barely any UXR jobs to apply to in general – And if there are, the salaries are suddenly atrocious, especially for places like NYC or the Bay Area.

2. I barely/rarely/never get a response to any of the roles I apply to – This is the one that I'm just like WTF – This is to be expected, of course, in any job search, but it seems especially bad??

On this second point, my non UX friends will say the market is bad in their fields as well, but they're still getting responses and interviews. I'm getting radio silence. Yes, I've reworked my resume a ton, but are you also experiencing this? And if not, why do you think that is?

I mean, I also believe UXR is getting annihilated in this market, and there have been tons of layoffs, so there are just lots of people likely in this field out of work and not a whole lot of hiring. So are you experiencing something similar, or is it truly my resume that's the issue, as my friends claim? lol

Context: I'm a Master's student using a survey for my thesis. The survey however consists of quite a few open-text questions as well, to which I've received a decent amount of responses (Almost all of which are at least 2-3 lines in length). To ease up my coding process, I was going through possible alternatives to Atlas.ti (The pro version is licensed by my university to download it onto my system but I cannot access since I run Linux. For some reason their access is only a 7 day trial period on the web-app, so basically allowing people to just download the software.)

I would appreciate any help or recommendations in this regard as the alternatives I have found so far seem to be lacking in their usecases or are not compatible on Linux as well or paid. I do use R for my quant coding but I'm not sure I'm having sufficient prowess in it yet, to run the qual analysis on it as well. Or at least I think i do not lol

Hey, I as a product designer, worked under design leader with background in arts that doesn't understand behavioral design, design ops and does concept art for UIs.

Did you have similar experience? Are there many design leaders that are pixel pushers that are good at politics?
Share your story please!

What’s the current market standard for a UX Researcher with ~3 years of experience in India, moving from an Indian product startup to a international product-based company?

UX researcher at a healthtech app, only been doing this about a year and just wrapped my first real round of user interviews on a workflow redesign.

And even coding one session is taking me the better part of an afternoon, so with the synthesis deck due friday, I've still got most of them untouched, and I'm basically stuck between rewatching everything in a panic or shipping themes from what i managed to code when the deck needs the full round.

Tried a few tools people have mentioned in other threads (Dovetail, BuildBetter, Condens) but I'm still not sure how much of the heavy lifting these take off, because it still feels like most of the thinking is on me, so it's coming out to more time scrubbing than analyzing.

So i'M wondering if anyone else here is in the same spot, and what's helping you get from raw transcripts to something a PM will read?

We’ve really been struggling with a way to catalog/surface our research findings in a more suitable and transparent way (the current jumble of confluence pages just isn’t cutting it).

How do you organize your historical research? Is it a database? Is it searchable? Can you search by keywords? Right now we have almost none of that functionality and are reliant on memory and/or manually chasing down old findings.

hi, Im meeting with various vendors this week to get pricing but is there any all in one tool for both AI mod and human mod with a panel you like?

I was laid off from my previous company while I was already interviewing for another position. In the meantime, I found a new job and started working in Human Factors at another company.

The new company is also in the healthcare/medical device sector, and the role is closely related to the position I’m interviewing for. The interview process had already started before I accepted the new job.

Should I proactively tell the company I’m interviewing with that I’ve since started a new position?

I’m wondering whether it could look bad if they find out later, especially since both companies operate in the same sector. At the same time, I don’t want to unnecessarily complicate the situation or make it seem like I was hiding anything.

Would you disclose the new job at this stage, or just continue with the interview process as normal?

Hiya. Im a user design researcher who has been working in the field for roughly 4 years. Today I read about synthetic users being used in research to save on costs after being requested to start using them. What's your opinion on this? Have you personally used synthetic users in your research? How did it go?

I'm of the mindset that I would never use synthetic users as I don't see how it would generate new insights, but happy to have my mind opened.

After watching a lot of research findings die in a Slack channel, I put together a short checklist I now run every clip through before sharing it out. Sharing in case it's useful to others:

• Does the clip open on the finding, not the warm-up chatter? First 3 seconds should tell them why they're watching.
• Is there a one-line caption above the fold stating the "so what," not just the quote?
• Did you trim to under 90 seconds? Anything longer and it becomes "I'll watch it later" (i.e., never).
• Does it name the persona/segment, not just "a user"? Context changes how much weight stakeholders give it.
• Is there a clear next step attached (a decision, a link to the full session, a tag to the right PM)?

Curious what other researchers have found actually gets an interview clip watched vs. ignored. What's worked for you?

Currently working on the agency side working on a project that’s conducting remote testing next week.

Stakeholder wants me to share my screen with the prototype during the interviews, meaning I would be doing the clicking, not the participants. They’re building a back up version that’s accessible via Figma I can share with participants. One concern they flagged is the UI interaction on Figma won’t be the same as the internal prototype link, but I explained to them this is a prototype and I can explain that to participants too.

I’ve always done testing where I share the prototype link to the participant and have them “own” the interaction/exploration. My gut says I should push back and say we go with the Figma link to share with participants for the reasons I stated above. On the other hand, are there any positives for having the participants telling me what to do as I share the prototype on my side?

Hi everyone,
I’m a 19 year old Psychology student in India currently pursuing my bachelor’s degree. Recently, I became interested in UX Research because it seems to combine psychology, research, and understanding human behavior.

I have a few questions:
What is the typical path from a Psychology degree to UX Research?
Is a bachelor’s degree enough, or is a Master’s usually required?
Do I need to learn coding (Python, Java, etc.), and if so, how much?
What skills should I start building while I’m still in college?
What kinds of internships or projects would help me stand out?
Has anyone here with a Psychology background successfully transitioned into UX Research or a role at a company like Google?
I’d especially love to hear from people in India who have followed this path.
Thanks in advance for any advice!