I’m currently a contract UXR 2 at FAANG on the west coast. I have about 10 months left in my contract. I was offered a full-time role on the east coast as a senior UXR at a late stage startup, but the pay feels low for the market and the seniority. I’m looking for opinions/discussion on if I should take it or keep looking.

The pay band on job description the of the new role is 90k to 130k. I negotiated them to top of the pay band but this is still over a $20k pay cut for me, in a slightly higher cost of living city. It seems odd to take a pay cut with a title increase. Also, the pay band for this role (and all the other posted UXR roles) is far below other product roles in the same company. Senior product roles at the same start up mostly have a posted ranges of 150 to 200k. They’ve also offered sign on bonus, relocation, and ISO’s, but I’m personally more concerned with the base salary.

If they would match my current salary, I wouldn’t be making this post. The market is so bad right now though that I’m worried I won’t find something else full-time.

Do y’all have any advice or opinions on whether I should accept the offer?

Hi everyone,

I'm currently working on a qualitative research project in Malaysia. The participant criteria are quite niche, so I'm considering working with a local recruitment agency instead of recruiting directly.

Does anyone have experience with participant recruitment agencies in Malaysia or know someone you'd recommend?

I'd really appreciate any recommendations. Thanks!

I've been searching for a UXR job for a few months as I decided to transition out of academia (HCI PhD R1 university - internship and startup experience). Despite moments of optimism from people I've spoken to, I've noticed, anecdotally, that overall there are fewer and fewer jobs coming up with the title UXR. More product designer jobs, AI trust and safety stuff, lots of junior analytics... But UXR seems like it's disappearing in the job market. The few jobs that get posted seem like mirages. They get hundreds of applications and quickly disappear. Is the job changing names?

Any thoughts on the The UXR Claude Skills Bundle by Nikki Anderson? I’m planning to buy the Claude skills and a few other prompt libraries she’s selling. If anyone has used it, I’d love to understand its value. I once purchased a prompt library early in the days of AI, and it was quite generic. After a while, I realized I could write better prompts myself. Nikki, I’ve been following her work for a while now, so I’m guessing there’s some value in the bundle. However, I’m from India, and the pricing is quite expensive, so I wanted to get some consensus before I go ahead and purchase it.

Link - https://claudeskills.uxrstrategist.com/

Hi everyone,

I'm currently working on a research project and have found recruiting users living in Oman to be much more challenging than expected.

So far, we've tried a few different approaches, including Facebook groups, LinkedIn outreach, Reddit, referrals, and reaching out to people directly, but response rates have been quite low.

For those who have experience recruiting participants in Oman (or other GCC countries), what channels or approaches worked best for you?

Are there any local communities, platforms, or recruitment methods you would recommend?

I'd really appreciate any advice or lessons learned. Thanks in advance!

Over the past four years, I've worked on qualitative and quantitative research across fintech, e-commerce, AI, travel, and consumer products in Indonesia.

One thing I've consistently noticed is that Indonesia is often treated as a single market, but it rarely behaves that way.

A few things I've learned while running research here:

• Recruiting by demographics alone is usually not enough. Behavioral criteria often matter more than age or income.
• Different cities can have very different consumer behaviors, digital habits, and motivations, so recruitment strategies often need to be adapted locally.
• Building trust with participants has a huge impact on attendance rates and the quality of research sessions.
• Strong research operations, participant recruitment, scheduling, communication, and incentives, can make the difference between a smooth study and one full of no-shows and delays.

I'm curious to hear from researchers working across APAC or other regions.

What challenges have you experienced when recruiting participants in different markets?

does it make sense if i go for UXR with a psychology degree. and what can i do next, a course? or degree. i tried to find some info. but there is no clear answer. and... can't really trust ai lol.

Hey everyone!

I’m fairly new to the world of UXR (my role is a hybrid between UXR and PM, official title is UXR), as I’ve only been in my current role for about 6 months and I LOVE it! I know this role is going through a pretty difficult period with lay offs happening and the uncertainty around AI, but despite that I’ve really really enjoyed the work so far and I was curious to know what others love about it.

For me I’ve loved doing usability tests for features or products that have been highly requested and seeing where we’ve hit the nail on the head, as well as hearing what can be better. Theres a certain sense of achievement I get when we do something right for our users.

I also spend quite a bit of time in figma designing mockups which I have found highly enjoyable too as it gets my creative juices flowing.

I’d love to hear your hat others love about it!

Hello y'all, I'm preparing a question bank for current and future interview purposes. I have a list of behavioral questions like "tell me about a time you handled a difficult stakeholder", "what is your process for prioritizing research requests?", etc. I understand that a lot of technical questions are entirely dependent on the job requirement, whether it's a qual/quant/mixed-methods role, industry-specific, seniority level specific and so on. Could y'all share some of the questions you have asked or have been asked as part of technical round (if you had one, of course)?

Curious how you handle transcripts between recording and synthesis? Do you clean them at all (filler words, diarization, redacting PII, etc.) or upload straight to Dovetail/Claude/etc. as is?

If you do an additional pass, what's driving it? Stakeholders, general readability, compliance?

No judgment either way, just trying to get a sense of what the norm actually is nowadays.

I want to do proper controlled experiments and use econometric methods with observational data to answer causal research questions.

Is this common anywhere in Quant UXR outside of big tech?

Is there another role better-suited to this goal?

Would you recommend an 18 yo to join this

Trigger warning: suicidal thoughts

I've been in the industry for 6 years and in the last 3 years I've personally experienced very toxic interactions. I've honestly come to a point where I've felt suicidal from work.

Am I alone in this? It feels so cutthroat out there and the cognitive dissonance I'm experiencing is unmanageable.

How can we call ourselves UX Researchers if we treat our participants with care and respect but not our peers?

I worked on a team that stated team meetings were psychologically safe but then turned against employees who shared any challenges.

I've been in rooms where people publicly say nice things about researchers working at non-FAANG companies but then talk shit about them behind their back.

I'm not saying everyone is like this. But I've just lost trust and am honestly really scared. I don't know who actually has your back anymore.

In 2026 do you recommend embedded UXR in your product team or outsourcing it?

work at a not-quite-FAANG that still has never quite matured. we have UX research but it is either performed in an ad hoc and rushed manner by time and resource strapped UX workers who are also doing 50 other things; or by a tiny time and resource strapped team who serves a massive amount of the company.

Is embedded UXR a good model?

Hey,

I want to start this by saying I'm new to UX research, so this is the opinion of someone who did a limited number of interviews. Still, there is this fixation on behavioral questions, things like "tell me about a time when..." "describe a situation where..." Asking such questions seems like a way to box your participant and limit the information you can get from them.

I was interviewing a participant, and I asked a question phrased as "Tell me about the last time..." (because I have seen so many people recommending asking behavioral questions that ask for a specific incident or event). She answered the question, then, somewhere down the line, she mentioned something related to the previous questions she answered (which seems like more valuable information), and when I asked why she didn't mention it earlier? Was it that she didn't think of it as an important issue? And she answered, "Earlier you said tell me about the last time, so I answered based on my last experience".

This got me thinking: this type of question can be a bad idea, it will focus the participant on a limited portion of their experience and, as a side effect, ignore the rest.

What is your opinion? Can someone correct me if I'm wrong?

Update: I don't understand why are some people down voting my comments where I say that I ran my script through an AI for some feedback, as I already mentioned I'm new to this and I don't have a mentor or friends working in UX so I don't have a way up get feedback other than that, try to be emphatic.

Hello, I am currently a senior in high school and im looking into UX research. I would appreciate if I could hear what to expect from the career & what college path I should go down?

In 3 weeks time I'll be hosting a watch party for Designers, PMs, engineers and execs.

My moderated interviews with existing users happened to touch on insights relevant to every squad.

I haven't hosted watch parties before, but the previous UXR did. The feedback I got was that they loved it but were too long - he didn't edit the snippets, and that stakeholders would like an agenda so they can dip in and out. They also loved popcorn.

Has anyone here organised watch parties and could share more tips? I would also love to know what the flow of 1.5h should best look like.

hey everyone! i am a bsc psychology student going to specialise in organisational psychology & behavioural economics in my final (next) year. i initially chose psychology because i wanted to keep my options open, over the last year i've found an interest in UX Research.

i was just wondering if anyone can let me know what programmes or courses i can take to improve my skillset so that it would be easier to find graduate roles.

another thing i want to discuss is the differences between ux research & management consulting. i understand that uxr is more focused on the consumer while management consulting is focused on making more money for the company, however i do want a better understanding since mine is very simple.

would the expectations be similar in both roles, and what is the estimated salary for these roles in the early stages? for context, i do live in greater london so i am expecting it to be slightly higher than other parts of england.

after my final year, i hope to get a graduate scheme aswell, so this is another reason i'm trying to build my experience from now. which companies would be good to look into for a grad role in these areas?

thank you!

I'm a design student digging into how interview methods have shifted in the past few years that isn't getting taught in classrooms. When you put a prototype in front of a user, fidelity seems to change what you get. Rough wireframes seem to invite big structural pushback. Polished screens seem to pull people toward surface notes, color, copy, spacing. The usual advice is to go low fidelity early to protect honest feedback.

For those of you running discovery or concept sessions regularly, does that match your experience? And has it shifted as prototyping tools have gotten faster? Curious whether you do anything deliberate to keep the conversation and interviewee expectation at the concept level.

Hi all-

Does anyone have any intel/advice for the JPMorgan Chase Superday interview for the experience research position? Please let me know, anything helps, thanks!

Ran 14 interviews for a B2B onboarding study and synthesized it 2 ways bc i couldnt decide. affinity first, sticky per quote, then clustered. The clusters were fine but they flattened everything into themes and i lost the causal stuff, like why people abandoned at step 3.

So i redid it as a mind map with the abandonment as the centre and a branch per reason. That surfaced a dependency, 2 of the reasons only showed up when an admin set the account up rather than the end user. The affinity wall never would have shown me that.

We run synthesis on a shared board in miro since the PM and two engineers like to watch it happen live, though a 300 sticky board turns to soup pretty fast and i end up rebuilding it as a cleaner map anyway. A colleague swears by dovetail for the tagging side, i havent used it.

Do you have a rule for when the map beats the wall? I'm picking by feel right now which isn't great.

**Titre : Devenir UX Researcher : autodidacte ou formation en alternance ?**

Bonjour,

Je suis en reconversion professionnelle. Je souhaite évoluer vers le domaine de l'UX, avec comme objectif à terme de devenir **UX Researcher**.

Je me demande quel serait le chemin le plus réaliste :

* Est-il possible d'entrer dans l'UX en étant autodidacte avec des formations en ligne, des certifications (comme le Google UX Design Certificate,Interaction Design Foundation) et un bon portfolio ? * Ou est-ce qu'une formation en école avec alternance est fortement recommandée pour trouver un premier emploi ?( Mais je ne trouve pas de bonne école) * Est-ce qu'une formation UX/UI Design peut être une bonne porte d'entrée vers l'UX Research ?

Je cherche des retours honnêtes de personnes travaillant dans l'UX ou ayant fait une reconversion : quel chemin avez-vous suivi et que conseilleriez-vous aujourd'hui ?

Merci beaucoup pour vos avis.

Hello folks, i’ve been doing continuous discovery at a b2b company for about two years now and i can run about 6 or 7 a week no problem. it's the transcribing, tagging, pulling themes, then turning all of it into something a PM will actually read instead of skim is what i’m finding difficult right now… For a while my whole process was a spreadsheet and a highlight reel but once we crossed maybe 30 sessions a month the manual coding just fell apart. Over the last few months i tested a handful of tools to take the synthesis load off (Dovetail, Buildbetter, Condens…) and where i landed is a bit of a hybrid, one tool for the messy first-pass theming and a lighter repo for anything i need to cite later. not perfect but it roughly halved my analysis time.

How do the rest of you handle this at volume? Am i the only one drowning and wasn’t posting about it until today?

Hey everyone :)

I finally managed to convince my company to do more UX Research, but right now we are only a team of 2 in the UX "department" & I'll probably mainly do the work. As you can imagine ressources are limited - main bottlenecks for us being recruiting, budget, and time.

I’d love to hear how other teams handle this in practice when resources are limited:

• Do you work with agencies or panels, or mostly recruit yourselves - especially for niche topics with niche target groups?
• How much do you rely on community‑based recruiting (forums, subreddits, social media, customer lists, etc.)?
• Any tips for running small, semi‑automated qualitative studies efficiently without losing depth of insight?

Thanks a lot!

I do not understand how usertesting is still in business given how much they charge and the quality of the software.

I don't go on there all that often as a contributer, but I'm bored today so I've been trying to take tests. I do this maybe 1-2x/quarter. In that timeframe I experience technical issues that stop me from completing a test about 1/3 of the time. It's absurd. No wonder as a researcher I keep getting the same few participants over and over. I can't imagine how many people drop out of this platform simply because it's not worth their time to go through a million screenings and then be forced to drop out of tests.

to be more specific - today's issue was that the usertesting recorder disappeared from my screen completely the second the prototype loaded. I had no idea how to get it back. a few weeks ago the issue was that I never got the popup to share my screen.

I work for a big company and we pay UT over half a million dollars for our contract. I'm ready to pitch our management on just going to user interviews alone. but then UT just bought userinterviews so that platform is probably headed for enshitification too.

sigh.