The Dual-wielding Skill

As a UX researcher and designer, I have been able to leverage my skills to bring numerous benefits to my work. Firstly, my design experience enables me to craft more precise research questions and activities, leading to more nuanced insights into user behavior and motivation, and thus, increased productivity in research.

Secondly, my understanding of the designer's perspective and project requirements allows me to communicate research findings more effectively and persuasively. This helps ensure that research insights are actionable and useful, resulting in more effective designs.

Finally, my experience as a researcher has made me more empathetic to user needs, and as a result, I approach design with a user-centered mindset, leading to more competent design outcomes.

Overall, being both a UX designer and researcher has given me a unique skillset that enables me to create more effective and user-friendly designs that meet the needs and expectations of users.

As a “researcher”…

I bring expertise across these key areas:

  • Qualitative research.

  • Trend study.

  • Workshop facilitation.

  • LEGO Serious Play certified facilitation.

  • UX Design and design management.

What sets my work apart is the dedication to research processes, believing the journey of discovery is as crucial as the findings themselves. I call this journey, “the U-research”, and it has 5 key steps that helps to provide grounded insights and create meaningful design.

1) Context Diving

It is very important to know if all stakeholders are on the same page. What are the consensual requirement for a successful research? Secondly, what is the context of this research. Of course the easiest way to learn is by doing.

Expert Interview

Experts’ opinions can quickly help us to understand how things work, the context behind and to give hints of clues to generate and prioritize research questions.

Stakeholder Workshop

Brainstorming and ranking ideas with interdisciplinary stakeholders can help project team to focus and quickly align important research topics.

Learning by Doing

Nothing beats understanding the project context by experiencing the product or the service firsthand. This helps research or design to be based in reality.

2) Desktop Research

I conduct desktop research to understand the research topics better before planning qualitative studies. It is also important to gather secondary data to support later findings.

Reference Search

Competitor Benchmark

Market Data Translation

3) Qualitative Research

In-depth Interview

The majority of my works is to conduct in-depth interview. Although each study has its specific objectives and requires different interviewees, there are principles I incorporate during the process:

  1. Encourage the conversation.

  2. Find out what interviewees are passionate about.

  3. Ask for advices.

  4. Be where the actions happened.

  5. Take lots of photos.

Focus Group

I found focus group mostly efficient during design prototyping and post-product launch.
The essence is less focus on individuals’ stories but to recognize the reasonings behind consensus and arguments about the design.

Observation

There are situations that making observation or shadowing works better than interacting with users. This method aims to gain insights by knowledgeable interpretation of users’ behaviors and avoid their posed answers.

Discussion Toolkits

Besides questionnaires, I enjoy design research toolkits for the interviews to initiate conversation, encourage personal sharing, and co-create visual and meaningful data.

4) Analysis & Synthesis

Download Data

Besides interview transcripts, voice recordings, and photos, I prefer organizing information via post-it and printed-out images. It helps to outline each interviewees quickly to share with other project members.

Document User Stories

User stories are important in the research because those unique behaviors and interesting anecdotes help us build sympathy toward interviewees. They provide intriguing and relatable substance for development team to discover opportunities.

example image of user story

Create Persona, User Journey, Pain & Gains

There are many ways to present the research findings, such as persona, customer journey, pain and gain points. Models are visualization-oriented and having summarized content.

Present in Infographic

Combining desktop research, literature review, and other common analysis methods, I help my viewers gain insights and identify opportunities by visualize data and findings.

5) Facilitation

Ideation Workshop

This approach is to apply our research insights and work together with designers to create concept prototypes. The core activity is to guide designers to create analytical themes based on user needs and inspire them to generate solutions.

Warm Up
Sharing

Body-storming

Ideation

Prototyping

Trend Workshop

There are many trend reports available every year but the question is how do those trends connect to design works. I have created trend toolkits to facilitate workshops with designers and other front-line colleagues to generate ideas for future business.

Co-design Workshop

The essence of co-design workshop is not just only to bring real-life users into our working process. It is also about opening mind and to think from their perspectives to determine and prioritize user needs.

Lego Serious Play Facilitation

Lego Serious Play is a workshop for a group of people to discover core values of the business and the connection among different moving components. Participants are empowered to articulate information and share stories via playing with Lego blocks.

UX Design

Although I have officially worked as a UX designer for only four years, my involvement in this field dates back to the early days of Web 2.0. It all began in 2005 when I started experimenting with HTML and Flash for school projects and designing my own blog. Additionally, I gained experience in motion graphics and animation by utilizing tools like 3ds Max and Cinema 4D for presentations. During my time at Rautaruukki, I even had the opportunity to write a UX design guideline for construction engineering software. Furthermore, I successfully designed and maintained a company website using Axure and jQuery.

Currently, I am confidently utilizing Figma and After Effects to create captivating UX designs, leveraging my extensive experience in handling inter-device interactions.

Below are some examples or you can check my works here.