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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for User Experience Research Specialist

💰 $ - $

User ExperienceResearchUX

🎯 Role Definition

The User Experience (UX) Research Specialist is a practitioner who plans, conducts, analyzes, and communicates user research across product lifecycles. This role uses mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) to uncover user needs, behaviors, pain points, and motivations; synthesizes findings into actionable recommendations; and collaborates with product management, design, engineering, and marketing to inform product strategy and UX decisions. The UX Research Specialist balances fast, iterative discovery with rigorous studies for strategic initiatives and supports research ops and knowledge-sharing to scale research impact across the organization.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior UX Researcher / Research Coordinator
  • UX Designer or Product Designer with research focus
  • Market Researcher, Customer Insights Analyst, or Human-Computer Interaction graduate

Advancement To:

  • Senior UX Researcher / Lead UX Researcher
  • Principal UX Researcher or Research Manager
  • Head of UX Research / Director of User Research
  • Product Research Partner or UX Strategy Lead

Lateral Moves:

  • Product Manager (with user expertise)
  • UX Designer / Service Designer
  • Content Strategy or Design Operations roles

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Plan, design, and execute a broad range of user research studies (moderated and unmoderated usability testing, in-depth interviews, contextual inquiry, diary studies, field studies, surveys, and A/B test analysis) to answer product and business questions and validate design hypotheses.
  • Define clear research objectives, success criteria, and recruitment criteria; create study scripts, discussion guides, consent forms, and test scenarios tailored to user segments and product contexts.
  • Recruit and manage diverse participant panels (internal and external), including screening, scheduling, incentives, and compliance with privacy and research ethics guidelines.
  • Conduct in-depth qualitative interviews and contextual inquiries to uncover user motivations, workflows, mental models, and pain points that inform product decisions and roadmap prioritization.
  • Design and run moderated remote usability tests and in-person labs; observe sessions, take detailed notes, and synthesize qualitative signals into prioritized usability issues and recommended fixes.
  • Implement and analyze remote unmoderated studies using platforms like UserTesting, Lookback, or similar, ensuring valid metrics, task flows, and capture of qualitative feedback.
  • Perform quantitative analysis of survey data, analytics events, and A/B test results to triangulate findings and quantify opportunity spaces, adoption gaps, and conversion blockers.
  • Translate raw research data into clear artifacts: user personas, journey maps, empathy maps, task analyses, experience metrics (e.g., SUS, task success time), and evidence-backed UX recommendations.
  • Present research findings and strategic recommendations to cross-functional stakeholders (product, design, engineering, marketing, leadership) through compelling narratives, visual storytelling, and concise executive summaries.
  • Partner with product managers and designers to convert research findings into actionable roadmap items, hypotheses for experimentation, and prioritized design improvements.
  • Collaborate with data science and analytics teams to create instrumentation plans, define UX metrics, and develop dashboards that track experience-led KPIs and measure the impact of design changes.
  • Design and run accessibility and inclusive research activities to ensure products are usable for people with disabilities and represent diverse demographics, behaviors, and contexts of use.
  • Advocate for research-informed product decisions; contribute to design critiques, feature planning sessions, and sprint ceremonies by bringing user-centered evidence to the conversation.
  • Maintain rigorous documentation of research plans, raw data, consent forms, transcripts, and synthesis artifacts in the team’s research repository to ensure traceability, reuse, and compliance with data retention policies.
  • Mentor and onboard junior researchers, designers, and product partners on research methods, participant recruitment best practices, and how to read and apply research outputs.
  • Establish and iterate on research templates, playbooks, and best practices (research ops) to scale consistent, high-quality research across teams and reduce friction in running studies.
  • Conduct longitudinal and retention studies to understand behavior change over time and identify opportunities to increase engagement, reduce churn, and improve lifetime value.
  • Run competitive usability benchmarking and heuristic evaluations to compare experiences and surface feature gaps relative to market alternatives and industry standards.
  • Synthesize cross-study insights and maintain a rolling research roadmap to inform long-term product strategy, new feature discovery, and investment prioritization.
  • Ensure research activities comply with legal, privacy, and ethical guidelines (GDPR, CCPA where applicable); work with legal and privacy teams to maintain participant confidentiality and secure data handling.
  • Support product launches and post-launch evaluations by designing quick validation studies, monitoring feedback channels, and iterating on UX fixes tied to measurable outcomes.
  • Facilitate workshops, co-creation sessions, and design sprints with stakeholders to translate research findings into prototypes, user flows, and prioritized experiments.
  • Use storytelling techniques and data visualization to create research deliverables that are digestible for non-research audiences and drive stakeholder empathy and alignment.

Secondary Functions

  • Maintain and improve the research repository and knowledge base (research notes, tagged insights, recordings, and deliverables) to increase discoverability and reuse across product teams.
  • Support cross-functional teams with ad-hoc research requests and quick-turn discovery studies to unblock product decisions within agile cadences.
  • Contribute to the organization's research strategy, help define research OKRs, and align research activities with company goals and product KPIs.
  • Evaluate, select, and onboard research tools and platforms (remote testing, transcription, analytics, recruitment panels) to optimize research efficiency and quality.
  • Train product and design teams on basic research techniques (how to run interviews, analyze feedback) to increase research literacy and democratize user insights.
  • Participate in hiring and interviewing candidates for UX research and design roles; contribute to creating role-specific interview exercises and rubrics.
  • Audit product accessibility periodically and recommend remediation steps; collaborate with designers and engineers on inclusive design patterns and accessibility testing.
  • Track research metrics (time to insight, studies completed, stakeholder satisfaction) and iterate on research ops processes to streamline throughput and impact.
  • Coordinate vendor or panel-based research engagements, manage contracts, and ensure external partners adhere to study protocols and ethical standards.
  • Liaise with customer support and success teams to synthesize qualitative customer feedback into hypotheses for future research and product improvements.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Mixed-methods research expertise: moderated/unmoderated usability testing, contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, and large-scale surveys.
  • Strong qualitative analysis skills: coding, thematic analysis, affinity mapping, grounded theory approaches, and synthesis into actionable findings.
  • Quantitative research skills: survey design, statistical basics (t-tests, chi-square, correlation), basic familiarity with A/B testing and experiment analysis.
  • Proficiency with UX research and analytics tools: UserTesting, Lookback, Dovetail, Optimal Workshop, Hotjar, FullStory, Amplitude, Google Analytics, Hotjar (or equivalents).
  • Experience with research ops tooling and participant recruitment platforms, and running remote unmoderated studies at scale.
  • Familiarity with prototyping and design tools to collaborate closely with designers: Figma, Sketch, InVision, Miro for journey mapping and workshop facilitation.
  • Experience analyzing behavioral analytics and event data to triangulate qualitative insights with product usage metrics.
  • Knowledge of accessibility standards and testing tools (WCAG guidelines, screen reader testing, Axe, Lighthouse).
  • Competence with transcription, video analysis, and research documentation workflows; ability to create reproducible, auditable research artifacts.
  • Basic scripting or spreadsheet analysis skills (Excel, Google Sheets, SQL basics, R or Python for analytics optional) to handle survey scoring and simple quantitative pipelines.
  • Experience designing and evaluating UX metrics (SUS, NPS, task success rates, time-on-task) and connecting them to business KPIs.
  • Skilled in running remote research sessions and moderating sensitive interviews with empathy and neutrality.

Soft Skills

  • Strong storytelling and presentation skills; able to distill complex findings into clear, prioritized recommendations and executive-level summaries.
  • Excellent stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration skills; able to influence product and design decisions with evidence.
  • Curiosity-driven, user-centered mindset with strong empathy for diverse users and contexts.
  • Critical thinking and problem-solving skills, with the ability to design pragmatic research approaches under time and resource constraints.
  • Time management and project management skills to balance multiple concurrent studies and deliver on deadlines.
  • Adaptability and resilience in ambiguous product environments; able to pivot methods when new constraints or priorities emerge.
  • Coaching and mentoring skills to raise research literacy across the organization.
  • Strong ethical judgment and respect for participant privacy and consent in all research activities.
  • Attention to detail in documentation, study design, and data handling to ensure reliability and reproducibility of findings.
  • Facilitation skills for workshops, co-creation sessions, and cross-team alignment meetings.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Cognitive Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, Human Factors, Information Science, Interaction Design, or related field.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in HCI, Cognitive Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction, Design Research, Anthropology, or equivalent advanced study with a research emphasis.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
  • Cognitive Psychology / Behavioral Science
  • Anthropology / Ethnography
  • Human Factors / Ergonomics
  • Information Science / Data Science
  • Design / Interaction Design

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 2–5 years of hands-on UX research experience for mid-level roles; 0–2 years for entry-level research specialist roles.

Preferred: 3–7+ years of progressive, applied UX research experience across web and mobile products, with a portfolio of studies, deliverables, and measurable impact on product decisions.

  • Demonstrated experience conducting both qualitative and quantitative studies end-to-end, synthesizing insights, and driving product changes.
  • Proven ability to work in cross-functional agile teams and to translate research into prioritized product and design recommendations.
  • Track record of working with remote/distributed participants and leveraging remote testing platforms effectively.
  • Experience with accessibility and inclusive design research preferred.
  • Familiarity with privacy, consent, and legal considerations in user research (GDPR, CCPA) is a plus.
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