{"id":4073,"date":"2017-03-21T06:00:38","date_gmt":"2017-03-21T11:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/juneux.com\/blog\/?p=4073"},"modified":"2020-04-09T10:36:01","modified_gmt":"2020-04-09T15:36:01","slug":"how-i-changed-careers-from-journalist-to-ux-researcher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/juneux.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/how-i-changed-careers-from-journalist-to-ux-researcher\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Changed Careers from Journalist to UX Researcher"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I became a UX strategist and researcher in my typical klutzy Kristine fashion\u2014purely by accident. Oops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I discovered the journalist in me at a fairly young age\u2014around 14 or 15. It seemed more interesting to me to tell others’ stories rather than make up my own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

In high school, I had my sights set on becoming a NYC magazine editor.<\/p>\n

After college, I parlayed my journalism degree into a pretty awesome job as a writer and editor for Best Buy internal communications. I wrote about the latest cutting-edge technologies, corporate initiatives, and company news as well as managed several newsletters.<\/p>\n

But I was 24. I wanted to see if the grass might be greener somewhere else, so I quit and moved to another city 600 miles away. In 2000, I was hired as a web copywriter<\/strong>. (Which still blows my mind. That was the golden age of dial-up<\/strong>, people.)<\/p>\n

All writing isn’t the same<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Around the second day of my new job, I was given my first writing assignment: an email promotion for women\u2019s clothing. In addition to giving me a list of adjectives to work from, the marketing director described the target audience as \u201csomeone in her 40s or 50s, but thinks<\/em> young.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ahh… I knew next to nothing about marketing or advertising. (Except that Gap commercials<\/a> ruled, of course.) I was a journalist, afterall.<\/p>\n

Write a promotional email? I don\u2019t think I had ever EVEN SEEN ONE before. People barely shopped online. HTML email didn\u2019t exist yet.<\/p>\n

Apparently my copy was so bad, I wasn’t even asked to write a second draft. Fun fact: copywriting and content writing are 2 entirely different skillsets.<\/p>\n

So instead of copywriting, I settled in as a web producer (in today’s terminology). I published and managed product copy and images around the clock for 9 different websites.<\/p>\n

Then the dot-com bubble popped and 5 of the 9 websites folded.<\/p>\n

And then I was laid off.<\/p>\n

And then I was hired back.<\/p>\n

My UX career begins<\/strong><\/h2>\n

But this time, I was put in charge of redesigning the still-standing websites… Something to do with my persistent begging. I just knew<\/em> the websites were not user-friendly, but all I had was intuition.<\/p>\n

Luckily books like \u201cDon’t Make Me Think<\/strong>\u201d by Steve Krug and \u201cE-commerce User Experience<\/strong>\u201d by Jakob Nielsen came out around that time. Nielsen quickly became my mentor, and I consumed everything he wrote (or anyone he was associated with wrote).<\/p>\n

Over the next several years, I learned a ton about building, optimizing, and marketing websites. SEO, paid search, email segmentation, affiliate marketing, predictive analytics, multivariable testing, multi-touch attribution. My 3-person team grew to 25. Online sales grew from $1M per year to $1M per day.<\/p>\n

During those formative years, I became fascinated with usability testing<\/strong>. I loved talking to customers and watching them use the site. They would become confused in ways I had never imagined. It was exciting to discover problems and then solve them.<\/p>\n

When I returned to Minneapolis in 2007, I positioned myself as an information architect. (I hadn’t yet heard the term “UX designer.”)<\/p>\n

I quickly learned the ropes for what it meant to be a UX strategist \u2014 interviewing clients and their customers, reviewing competitor and analogous sites, sifting through analytics, and then synthesizing it all into a findings and recommendations deck.<\/p>\n

Later, I expanded my research toolkit<\/a> to include focus groups, ethnography, diary studies, card sorting, and others.<\/p>\n

Journalist skills are UX researcher skills<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Today, I use the same research, storytelling, and critical thinking skills as I did when I was a journalist \/ writer\u2014but now, they’re applied to serving the needs of customers, not readers.<\/p>\n

Below are the same skills I use today as a UX researcher as I did when I was a journalist and writer.<\/p>\n

Prepping for Interviews<\/strong><\/h3>\n