Exactly one year ago, I left my previous company, resigned from my role as Head of User Research, and decided to work as a freelance UX researcher. In the last twelve months, I got the chance to work for small startups and global corporations, both in B2C and B2B environments.

In 2016 I joined my company as their first and only UX researcher. Today I am the Head of a department that serves all teams with knowledge about our users. Here is what I learned in the last five years.

A large share of UX researchers has worked in different areas of design before moving into research, entering the field without any education in statistics. As UX research becomes more mixed method, I want to encourage every young UX research professional to overcome their fear of numbers, and start investing in data analysis skills.

The internet as we know it today will change. Rather invisible to the public eye, the technological foundations for a future version of the internet are defined today, and the two keywords are #blockchain and #decentralization.

Quite often, user satisfaction and business success are understood as opposite poles of the same axis. You either please your users by working on aesthetic functionalities, or you focus on business-driven initiatives. In too many planning sessions, the need to serve the user is overly expressed, as if there was a hidden fight for priorities: You either make money, or you make the users happy.

While many people do their new years resolutions and define personal goals for the next year, it shows that goals themselves do not lead to behavioral change. Instead, the system in which you act needs to change in order to enable a person to achieve goals in the long term.

It’s that time of the year again. It’s goal setting time. A new year just started, and that is a good chance for many people to set new goals and change their habits. The problem with goal setting is: It never works.

As a User Research team, we serve other departments in our company. We work for those who need our input right now and we serve those further in the future, who want to read through our reports. One of the most discussed issues is how to organize research in a way that you deliver insightful results fast and provide enough clarity in your report so that it stays relevant for a long time. In this article, I will walk you through all the steps on how to build a great repository for your user research work inside Notion, including tutorials and templates.

Many companies perceive User Research as a luxury, something you might consider after all the essentials are there. It is a common misconception that insightful User Research can only be done in one-way mirrored laboratory rooms with fancy camera systems. Here’s how you can bring the magic of User Research into your company, based on minimum budget.

Who’s opinion matters most when it comes to your product? The CEO’s opinion? The Marketing people’s opinion? Nope. Neither. As long as your users and customers don’t enjoy your products, it does not matter what anyone else thinks. It must be your business goal to understand your customers’ needs as best as possible.

UXers must be aware of their own cognitive biases in order to make reasonable, evidence based judgments.

When starting a path in UX research, you might ask yourself what environment will work best for you in order to get started, learn most and have the greatest impact as a UX researcher.

Hello to all psychology students around the globe. I know, you are currently reading stuff about neuroplasticity, factor analysis, cognitive dissonance and anorexia nervosa. But if you have a few minutes, drop your DSM IV, close SPSS and let me introduce you to a topic which you might want to consider as your future working field: User Experience Research.

UX is one of the things most people don’t think about, but once they start, its magic will set them on fire. The probability that the hairdresser, pizza delivery place, local newspaper, or any service provider in your neighborhood has ever considered implementing User Experience into their workflow is close to zero.

Hello from the usability testing lab in my office in Berlin Mitte. It is January 2016. And I have the pleasure to have this awesome job as a UX researcher, to be able to test our digital products, dig deep into design decisions and see how stuff evolves until it is finally released.

The value of art lays in the appreciation of its consumers. The more people enjoy looking at or listening to a piece of art, the higher its value as art is perceived. Most pieces of art, such as a drawn picture, a photograph or a musical composition can unfold their beauty without any further introductions or explanations.