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This maps for me. On point 3, we've been doing informal research "pods" in our team where 2-4 researchers are technically on the same topic together, seeming at first to possibly be overstaffed. But we've found the group setup increases research creativity - the conversations help us find the 3-or-4-for-1 research projects to tackle that allow us greater converage and depth in the end -, quality, and the researchers are happier because they get more time with their colleagues.
Agree. When we have 2-3 researchers on complicated projects, researchers are more satisfied with their work and produce higher value insights. The fun they have working together carries generates positivity and a strong foundation for tackling the hard stuff.
On finding the depth that sets you apart, and earning a reputation along the way
I'm often asked to recommend a tool or vendor for a research project. Over the course of 20+ years doing applied research, I've come to rely on a set of suppliers and software to consider when needed
I’ve recently had discussions with other Quant UXRs about “rigor” and what it means in our work. I’ve often heard it raised as a question over the years, and this prompted me to compile some thoughts. I propose a stack with 4 levels of how I view “ri...
Kelly Moran [Note from Chris: This week I've invited a post from Kelly Moran, a longtime colleague and exceptionally thoughtful and experienced qualitative researcher and anthropologist. Many of us are familiar with the qual/quant "sandwich" that alt...
In the past few months, I’ve had many conversations with senior folks across a variety of MAMANG and similar companies. These are all UXR managers or senior ICs (L5 and up, largely L6-L8 if you’re familiar with those levels). I expected to hear a variety of one-off, situational discussions, but to my surprise, the themes have been surprisingly coherent across my conversations.
In this post, I want to share what I’m hearing. This is reporting and I’m not arguing for or against any particular claim. Each claim could be a contentious discussion, and I’m not inclined nor do I feel sufficiently broadly informed to engage in the arguments in detail.
Put differently, my goal is simply awareness — and closely related, I hope that UXRs who feel isolated, gaslit, anxious, or confused will understand that they are not alone.
I will preface this with a caveat: these themes are what I am hearing, but I am not a random or representative sample. My connections and I self-select to chat, exactly because we often agree. Nevertheless, the views I’m hearing from senior UXRs are important in the UX industry.
I expect that no one will be surprised by this section.
For various reasons — ranging from layoffs to dissatisfaction — many of the UXRs I talk with are looking for new positions, and are quite frustrated by the experience. I’m hearing four primary trends:
A feeling that “there are no jobs”
Over leveling, with everyone seeking higher positions
More emphasis on specific skills, especially “quant” and “mixed methods” (maybe without understanding them)
Extreme asymmetry in openings between tech hubs — especially Silicon Valley, and to some extent Seattle and New York — versus most other locations and remote
As for over leveling, there is a trend towards acceleration of career levels, with folks expecting promotion every few years at least. This leads to two problems: (1) folks who are in over their heads when their breadth of experience (in methods, approaches, products, and politics) doesn’t match expectations of senior stakeholders, and (2) fewer job openings as they move up, paired with higher demands, leading to lower satisfaction. We say much more about that in Chapter 14 of the Quant UX book.
I am also hearing a lot of demand for quant skills, with positions often listing something “quant” added onto general UX research skills. However, it’s difficult to sort out the extent to which hiring managers actually understand what they are seeking in these cases. Some managers may expect little more than general attention to UX metrics (see Kerry Rodden’s excellent post) while others may imagine — quite unrealistically — that they can find a UXR who spans everything from qualitative fieldwork to data science logs analysis. Mostly, my advice here is for hiring managers to be very specific (see the Quant UX book) and for candidates to ask lots of questions and not oversell their quant skills. To be fair, what folks tell me about this may be biased due to my own experience.
There are some signs of recovery in the market but it is appearing tepid. My main recommendation for folks outside the Bay Area is to consider the idea of relocating there or at least to Seattle or another major tech hub. Yes, I know relocation is painful, expensive, and perhaps even unfair. I’m only saying that because it is the reality I am seeing.
TBH, I took the relocation advice once myself. In 2011, I was looking for new positions and the market in Seattle was bad at that time. Google offered me positions in Mountain View and New York, and I ended up moving — for 3 years, until transferring back to Seattle. In retrospect, it was a great career choice.
In social media (e.g., LinkedIn) there is a pervasive sense that UXR jobs are few, difficult to land, and swamped with applications. Given that, I was surprised by several hiring managers (HMs) who perceive a lack of UXR candidates. Not a single HM said they have too many candidates.
The three main things I heard about hiring are:
There are some jobs although headcount is tight
HMs don’t see enough candidates
Candidates don’t have the right skills
The first point is pretty obvious. Hiring managers often report that they are able to hire again, but they have substantially reduced headcount, compared to highpoint years such as 2022.
The second claim, from several folks, greatly surprised me: that they do not have enough candidates. For instance, I heard of one senior position at a MAMANG company that received fewer than 10 candidates, and among those applicants, the HM judged that none was qualified. To be clear, this is not due to an overall lack of applicants; I’ve heard this from managers at two of the top five largest tech companies, where the application pools are overflowing with candidates. And yet few filter through to HMs.
I don’t have a good explanation for this, although one important factor is how recruiting has changed since COVID and after the big rounds of layoffs in 2023 & 2024. Many long-tenured and knowledgeable recruiters lost their jobs or changed companies.
By the time hiring started to resume, companies had lost the recruiting skills and knowledge needed to understand, screen, assess, and attract specialized candidates such as Quant UXRs. It is not a position that can be reduced to a list of qualifications such as knowledge of methods. Instead, it is crucial for recruiters to understand how quant skills relate to stakeholder needs. When they understand that, they can improve screening by lightly probing candidates in initial interviews to see whether they are able to adapt and explain concepts and impact clearly. It takes time, experience, and support for recruiters to develop those skills. Additionally, as recruiter and hiring managers turn over, they lose the connections and understanding that previously led to alignment on potential candidates.
Meanwhile, the deluge of job-seekers — multiplied by AI and resume-padding — has overwhelmed recruiters. The difficulty for recruiters is compounded by rapidly changing requirements from upper management, fluctuating numbers of openings, and consequent pressure from hiring managers to fill positions quickly. An open position one week may be repurposed the next week, abandoning candidates who are in process … and discouraging recruiters from investing time in the next round of candidates.
The net result: the candidates who make it to hiring managers are far more random, and less well-screened than they were in pre-COVID times.
Recommendation for current, senior Quant UXRs: have you done 10+ interviews with candidates? Reach out to your recruiter(s) and ask whether they would sync with you about the experience. Perhaps you could sit down for an hour to review candidates in their pipeline. You might discuss the things you would look for on CVs, or simple phone screen questions with good and not-so-good example answers. This may boost the quality of candidates, and make a recruiting friend!
I love the UXR community — so this section is painful for me. But I am sharing it as I heard it.
This is a short section and makes me sad. I have increasingly heard from senior UXRs (L6 aka “Staff Researchers” and up) that they view colleagues and junior researchers as lacking skills. They claim things like:
Research is rudimentary and responds only to direct stakeholder questions, missing the larger picture
Research obtains obvious results and then is oversold as being very important
Research design has significant flaws such as skewed samples, leading questions, bad survey panel data, dubious methods, and the like
Specifically on the quant side, research may be primarily “procedural” in applying advanced methods or a great deal of code and analysis, but is applied to low quality or largely irrelevant data
Colleagues use questionable tools — LLMs are often called out — to write reports, deliver unreliable findings, and the like
This is often summed up as, “they have no idea what they’re doing” or “they just crank out meaningless reports.”
Now, I’m not making those claims, just reporting them. My personal impression is that we’re seeing a combination of several things:
Everyone is stressed and stretched. Junior UXRs do not have the mentoring or time to develop skills on the long time horizons that used to be common. Senior UXRs take out their frustrations by complaining about research quality.
Demands are increasing, as described above about management expectations
Research is becoming more difficult to do, with less support. This comes from a combination of difficulty recruiting participants, low quality survey panels, and shrinking budgets for research.
The breadth of UX methods has grown such that no one can be expert in everything; and yet stakeholders may well demand that any UXR tackle any kind of research.
As mentioned above, over-leveling causes both real problems and also interpersonal resentment.
My main recommendation here is for everyone to try to look for the best in others.
Managers: help your team do less in terms of breadth, and instead with more partnership in depth. Instead of having 4 UXRs run 8 different projects … try having 2 teams of 2 UXRs focus on 4 more important projects. You will have less “coverage” but that will be strongly offset by having much greater depth on the most important projects. 2 UXRs working together have a multiplicative effect. And it will build cohesion, develop skills, and insulate your team from shocks of turnover and the like.
LLMs were an important topic in every single conversation with senior UXRs. Typically AI / LLMs emerged as the #1 issue of discussion as a conversation progressed.
The most common concern is this: UXRs feel that LLMs are being pushed into products without any clear understanding of user needs for them.
Specifically, UXRs often see, feel, or believe one or more of the following:
Teams are told to “find a need” under a predetermined assumption that LLMs must be valuable
If UXRs find that customers do not want an LLM feature, management won’t accept the finding
If UXRs push back, they believe their own jobs are at risk in an awaited next round of layoffs
They worry that management doesn’t understand LLMs to begin with, so it is all an exercise in futility
They fear (or observe) this LLM push will erode product value, user satisfaction, and brand trust
These UXRs view the continual search for “ways to use LLMs” as a fool’s errand when there are urgent and obvious unmet needs and pain points in products. They may be seeing decreasing user satisfaction, pushback from users about AI, security threats, worsening UI experience, declining overall code quality, and immediately addressable needs that users are requesting — all of which are ignored in the promise of some AI utopia to come. Doing research on yet-another-AI-concept can be demoralizing in the face of actual user needs.
To be clear, I’m not saying that there are no uses for LLMs. I’m saying that AI does not change everything overnight, and that management expectations for AI are often out of alignment with users and users’ needs.
This mismatch between management expectation and the reality of interacting with users can lead to UXRs responding with helplessness, apathy, cynicism, dishonesty such as telling management what it wants to hear, and similar and other ultimately self-destructive responses.
Recommendation: if your research projects appear unrealistic, short-sighted, unlikely to ship or have impact, or even border on being delusional, find a way to add something that delivers value in another way. That might be foundational research you can do “for free” (and perhaps not even report), it might be learning about method to build your skills, or it might be following up on prior research. Research plans almost always offer the flexibility to learn more than simply meeting immediate goals. Best case, the team learns something. But the worst case is also good: you learn something!
The final thing I heard across my conversations was this: UXRs love being UXRs. Much of the anxiety concerned whether they would be able to continue as UXRs (or perhaps have to look for jobs in data science or PM); and whether the role of UXR could continue to look the way it has in the past, with the excitement and enjoyment of learning about users from direct interaction as well as data.
I’ve often said that UX Researcher (and its variants such as Quant UXR) are the best job in the world … for the right person. For people who love learning about many different products, tacking ambiguous research goals, doing research well, meeting customers and helping to solve their needs, and working in generally enjoyable and good positions, it is difficult to imagine a better career. Ultimately, learning from users and delivering better products must deliver high value on average.
So I expect the UXR situation to improve both in terms of jobs and research demands. When? That’s harder to say … but each of us can help that day come sooner. I hope these reflections and recommendations might help.
Final personal note: to increase well being and generally build community, I’ve organized a Zen meditation group for the Tech — especially UXR — community. This is not a sales pitch (and we don’t sell anything!) but just my personal note. There are many options to well being apart from Zen, but if you’re interested, details are at https://tczen.org Join a session or sign up for the newsletter.
More generally, treat your colleagues, the world, and yourself kindly. We’re all in this together!
For much more discussion, to meet other UXRs, and to hear different perspectives, I also encourage you to join us for Quant UX Con 2025 in November. Find details here!
