What I learnt as the first user researcher

About 4 years ago, I found out I was going to be the only user researcher at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) in the UK Government. This was quite daunting at the time and I struggled to find any tips or guidance on it. So, I’m writing this to share what I’ve learnt for people who are becoming the first, or are the only user researcher in an organisation.

Being the only user researcher, I learnt:

1. The importance of community
2. Building trust and relationships with others
3. How user research fits into an organisation (the bigger picture)
4. To prioritise, push back and protect my time
5. All the bits around user research that set it up for success

Being the first user researcher can be overwhelming, especially if (like me) you’d been working somewhere surrounded by experts and now it’s just you. Unaware I’d be the only user researcher when I applied, I was about to be paid almost double my salary and felt like I had no idea what I was doing.

First of all, trust yourself — you know more than you think. And if you don’t know, be honest and ask for help. Despite any natural feelings of fraud, this is a great learning opportunity for you and the organisation you’re joining. Lower the pressure on yourself, make mistakes and enjoy it!

For context: I had 3.5 years of experience as a UX Consultant at Nomensa before I landed the role at the Department of Health. A few months in, our digital team merged with the NHS to form the health and technology unit, NHSX. I remember feeling so relieved I’d be working with other user researchers, yet despite the ‘X’ standing for user experience, I was the first and only user researcher there too.

Armed with so many unanswered questions, aged 25 and full of self-doubt; I spent a lot of time trying to shape the role and profession in a new organisation with the spotlight on it around health and wider government. After 18 months, I left NHSX with a team of 4 user researchers and more contractors.

In this post, I’ll reflect on my learnings from this experience to help you with where to start, as the first in a team. These scrambled thoughts based on my experience, I’d love to hear yours too.

1. The importance of community

Ask for help

One of the most important things I learnt is although you might be the only one, you’re not alone. There’s so much strength in coming together as user researchers to learn from and support each other.

Working in government, I was lucky there’s a huge design community to link up with others through cross-gov Slack and events. If you’re not in government, can you join research communities that already exist, or keep in touch with colleagues from previous roles to set up something new? It helped me so much connecting with other user researchers who understood what it was like, particularly working in health. And sharing research plans for peer review, to challenge my own biases and protect people from harm. Thank you to Hayley Lily Sorrell for all your help and teaching me the importance of this.

Within the first month, I met with Lead User Researchers in NHS Digital, CQC, PHE and Department of Culture, Media and Sport. I was warmly welcomed by these user research teams who invited me along to their weekly and monthly meetings, particularly NHS Digital on Mondays. This helped a lot — thank you to Rochelle Gold, Jo O'Keefe, Chiara Garattini and Natalie Baron for being there.

Share your work

One good way to connect with other user researchers is by publishing your work in the open. This sounds daunting of course and I still don’t like doing it now. What’s helped me is knowing that sharing will help us all to learn and improve the work we’re doing. This book Show Your Work and Upfront Global will help you gain the confidence to take the leap!

You might need to check with your organisation for permission if sharing anything specific. Sharing work can be as small as a tweet, week-notes, or a blog post. Once I shared my work like this, other researchers got in touch to share learnings and how they’d approached similar challenges. I’m grateful for all the people who have written about their work to help me learn, too.

Even though I shared my work at the time, the biggest learning I missed here was trying to look like I knew what I was doing all the time — instead of being honest. It’s easy to say this now, when I’m more confident as a researcher than I was back then. But one of the main things that would have helped is reaching out ‘hey I’m starting as the first user researcher at the Department of Health tomorrow, which is daunting! Anyone got any tips or advice?’

I now realise me landing this kind of job in the first place, is the symptom of a wider problem of growing demand in the industry and that I put way too much pressure on myself to fulfil it.

Post of Show your Work on @sophieannrankin Instagram page

2. Building trust and relationships with others

I learnt that being a user researcher is a lot about building relationships with our team. We’re trying to encourage people think in a new way and to recognise research insights so that something happens with them. To do this, we need to build trust and good relationships with others so we can (firstly, enjoy work) and ultimately get buy-in and people to listen to us.

Find allies and senior support

Think about who is influential in the company that will have your back? Try and find people (even just one person) who can support you from a senior level and be an advocate for user research. If you can build a good relationship and feel comfortable approaching them, this will help to remove any blockers you will inevitably face.

Look for people who seem to be the most resistant to user research and learn what’s important to them, too. Over time, we can consider how to get these decision-makers on board through the type of work we decide to take on.

Build trust and relationships

I learnt it’s important to build people’s trust in user research and in me. What we really need is a team of user researchers and to do this, we need to prove it’s worth investing in. Pick small, measurable things you can do that will show your impact. What are your outcomes and success measures? What small things can you deliver that will show tangible benefit?

I tried to do this when delivering a small project early on, by involving the team in research observation and running introductory sessions about what user research is and why it’s important. Because I worked in a digital team who were hugely supportive and naturally because of the GDS standard, I maybe had less work to do convincing my team that user research was a good idea.

Our team analysing research findings together on a table with post-its

Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to demonstrate impact, you’ll be doing this anyway without realising. Having this in the back of your mind by picking things to measure over time, will help when building a case for recruiting more people, which you’ll need. Most importantly, get to know your team personally, so you can have fun working in this mess together!

Photograph of the NHSX mental health alpha team

3. How user research fits into an organisation

Spend time with senior people in the organisation to find out where it’s heading, their priorities and vision for the future. Even if it’s not explicitly stated in your job description (unless there’s a Head of joining), as the first user researcher it’s probably up to you to figure out how user research as a discipline can help them achieve that. Learn more about the backstory of how you were hired:

• What were the team doing up until now?
• How was research happening, if at all?
• What is already in place?
• Where are the gaps?
• And why did someone think it was worth hiring a user researcher?

This will help provide context on how and where you can add the most value.

I’ll always be grateful to Nayeema Chowdhury, for pushing me to step out of my comfort zone and rise to the challenge of shaping the user research profession in this role. Without her support, I’d almost certainly have just got on with the delivery, feeling like it wasn’t my place to think bigger or more strategically.

Where are we now?

Depending on the size and maturity of the organisation, you might want to do a quick temperature check on the current state of things. This can be 1:1s, reviewing previous work and doing some of your own research, on research.

In my first few months, I met all the team individually and sent an anonymous form around to see how much they knew about participant data, collecting consent and what tools or software they were using. I also threw in a few questions to see their understanding of a user researcher’s role. From this and working together on projects, I spotted the biggest gaps and opportunities.

Naturally you will start to spot gaps anyway, so a form might not be necessary. But these kinds of activities will help you to understand where the team is now and highlight any quick wins and opportunities for your role.

Example of responses to the anonymous form

4. To prioritise, push back and protect my time

Make a plan

Based on the above, I combined learnings from delivery, the organisation’s priorities, team meetings and common requests, to plan:

• Where do we want to be? (team vision)
• Where are we now? (temperature check)
• How will we get there? (plan/strategy)

This allowed me to break down what needed doing now, next, and later based on the biggest blockers. It helped to set goals for each quarter and milestones to keep track of what the research team had achieved over time.

Screenshot example of how we progressed through phases in response to learnings

When NHSX was first created, they were saying things like “And the needs of our users will be at the heart of everything we do because the ‘X’ in NHSX stands for user experience”. I remember reading this and knowing as the only user researcher — we were so far away from it. That’s the vision, but where are we now and what needs to happen to get us there? Looking back, of course this was so complex and up to many factors — way beyond my role in user research.

Prioritise

I struggled with knowing how to prioritise at first, always feeling like there was 101 things that the research team needed right now. By the end, I’d created an approach that worked well. It depends on your role, for me this involved splitting the team into 3 areas, colour coded on Trello:

• Research Operations (blue) — the processes to support effective delivery
• Delivery (orange) — the projects we delivered
• Capability (pink) —the training, workshops and guidance to build understanding and capability in user research

Breakdown of the user research role at NHSX — project delivery had product manager too

When the team grew, there was a category called Team and Community — things like team structure, skills matrix, recruitment and progression.

The purpose of this format is to split your time across these things (not just delivery). Every time we had a new idea, it was added it to the backlog. Every quarter, we used insights from delivery to prioritise the top 2–3 things getting in the way of our goals. When we had capacity, we could pick these things up to work on. I did this with other disciplines until more user researchers joined.

I treated the research team as bigger than myself, even if it was only me. It’s good to think of your team as at least 3 people larger than what it currently is, so that you’re set up ready for when new people join.

To help prioritise and find the biggest blockers, reflect at the end of each project with your team — what went well? what went wrong? what do we need for next time? and use this to inform the Research Ops and team strategy (eg. we need a more robust approach to participant recruitment).

Setting small goals and celebrating success is so important — especially if you work somewhere where progress feels slow. If you put a party emoji 🎉 in the title of the ‘done’ column, then fireworks will go off when something is dragged into there! (quite literally these small things kept me going)

Team photograph for the mental health discovery

Protect your time

If you’re the only user researcher, people may approach you about anything and everything — for me it was always surveys! It’s important to find a balance between helping teams and not overworking yourself, so do things that will reduce demand on your time.

A few months in, too eager to help everyone, I found myself writing up advice and helping teams with the same things over and over again. So, I started to capture patterns and to keep track of the most common requests. From this, I created re-usable guidance and training material they could refer to, without always needing to approach me about it. It’s also ok to say no, which I rarely did.

Don’t be afraid to challenge

In my first discovery project, I was told we wouldn’t be using external participant recruitment agencies, even the supplier wasn’t using one. I knew this was good practice and would save us time, but thought ‘oh they mustn’t use recruitment agencies here’ and spent the time scrambling around for participants instead. I could have said ‘we need to use a recruitment agency to find us general public participants quickly and reliably’. This comes back to the point of trusting yourself and your research expertise.

Push back

One thing to be mindful of, is that you can run into trouble if a team is just delivering projects. Make sure you allow time to shape the role and research operations or better still, hire people to do these specific things. In the meantime, push back on things that are unrealistic or too much work. I definitely took on way too much and didn’t use my manager enough to help.

By overpromising too much delivery, our work sometimes fell short because it didn’t have the around it to support it, such as a robust participant recruitment strategy, research operations and team training in response to problems. Without this foundation, things take longer, cost more money and lead to burn out.

I wrote a post about it here — as I found this to be common in other places too.

Facilitating a workshop for NHSX Screening programme

5. All the stuff around user research

I could write a whole article on this point, but as you can imagine I very quickly realised it’s not so much about the research itself, as it is about the things around it. Things like ResearchOps, team capability, the environment you’re in — all help to build a strong foundation for success.

Research Operations

This will be one of the first things you do, especially if you’re getting started with a project. ResearchOps will streamline delivery and make research more efficient and high quality. Feel free to skip over it if you know this stuff, but here’s some things to do with the data protection officer, when you first start:

• Data protection impact assessment (DPIA)
• Secure folders for storing participant data
• Consent forms and privacy notice
• Participant recruitment strategy
• Tools and equipment
• Ethics and safety procedures
• Research templates and on-boarding

Setting criteria for user research to get involved

You might not need to do this straight away, it’ll emerge as you take on more projects. What can help is to create your own criteria for choosing whether something requires your help. This might be things like:

• Is there a clear scope / need for a researcher?
• Has a decision already been made?
• Do we have enough time and money to recruit participants?
• Is it realistic and achievable?
• Does it align with our priorities as a team?

This ‘triage’ process became more obvious to us as the team grew and may have been the kind of organisation we were in. But we’d get involved in projects that weren’t really appropriate for user research and nothing would happen with the findings. This was quite demotivating for the team.

These kinds of things will help to decide whether something is sensible or too risky to get involved in, which has a knock on effect on user researcher’s wellbeing, impact and reputation. In leadership, it also helps to protect your team’s time and their development by placing them in areas they can thrive.

Learn by doing

The more projects I did, the more I learnt about how not to do things. Your first project will probably be the biggest learning curve, but you can use this as insight for what needs to improve. Involve the rest of your team in shaping this too, with project wash-ups and retros, collecting their feedback and how it was working with a user researcher in the team.

First project — Healthy Start Vitamins!

A few other things to consider:

• Even though you are the only researcher, do not do research alone — always involve your team in planning, observation and analysis
• Work alongside designers so that your research insights turn into something tangible and actionable, you can show or test
• Product Managers can help with navigating tricky stakeholder conversations and prioritising workload, make friends
• Make time to reflect— you’ll be making loads of progress even if it doesn’t feel like it. It’s good to look back on what you’ve achieved over time!

Remember, being in a situation where you’re about to be the only user researcher but don’t have much experience, is a symptom of the industry we are in. So if it feels hard, this is why. I wasn’t qualified to do this at the time, but it completely accelerated my learning and career. So much so, that I have never been able to go back to normal delivery or ‘un-think’ the things I learnt. Still, I’d recommend anyone starting a user research team for the first time, to bring in a lead role first and recruit beneath.

Despite the stress, I look back on this experience with fond memories working with one best teams — thank you. I learnt so much and you will too. In fact, you’ll probably learn more if you make mistakes and fail quickly, so work on feeling more comfortable with that (as long as nobody is harmed) and remember your success in life does not depend on this job :)

Good luck! ❤️

If you found this helpful, I’m doing an event ‘Being the only user researcher’ on Weds 18th May to bring people together and share my experiences on this topic since then. To come along, get your ticket here.