Please welcome

And here we are with some new folks to welcome to the community. Every week or so, I highlight some of the people new to our community. If you’d like to be included, even if you’re not exactly new, please just let me know. So now, without further ado…

@Sergey_Rozum comes to us from Moscow. He’s a UX Researcher and crossed over to here from our Slack community. His current company makes some B2B software for remote usability studies. He says that his “weapon of choice” is unmoderated studies. He uses his background experience from sociology to make his studies more interesting. He sometimes works as a methodologist, writing guides and explanations.

@melissa_f_pirkey says she is an academic trying to get out of academia. She’s recently completed her PhD in sociology and is now exploring different career paths. Some of her friends from school are moving into UX Research, so she decided to check it out as well. She says that she’s at, “the very very beginning of my journey, and I’ve come here in part for networking, and in part to have a place to ask those questions that can’t be answered necessarily by reading a book or a blog. I think we can learn a lot from sharing personal experiences.

@don_draper22 joined us because he’s thinking about changing careers and he wanted to learn about some of the skills that are needed in UX. At the moment, he’s thinking that he’s going to sign up for a boot camp and supplement that with meet ups.

@surya713 recently graduated with her PhD. In her thesis, she used many elements of UX and she’s fascinated with behavioral research. She has an academic perspective of conducting usability studies, so she’s looking for real-time product related UX research processes and to improve her design skills.

Hi @Sergey_Rozum, @melissa_f_pirkey, @don_draper22 and @surya713 - it’s great to have you all here! :slight_smile: Such a lot of different experiences and perspectives in your backgrounds. Looking forward to hearing more and helping out where we can.

@Lukcha @Piper_Wilson Thanks to you both!

I’m just curious. Besides work ethic and education in design & psychology, do folks pay attention to portfolio or certification? Is it a matter of both?

A portfolio is very important. It showcases how you think, which is your biggest selling point. Certification can be helpful, but it’s not as powerful.

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@Piper_Wilson and @Lukcha, many thanks for the warm welcome. Does the UX research in industry use theories from literature like from cognitive psychology or similar others ? Because one of the major feedback that I got during my PhD course and in literature reviews that I have done is, they stress on the gap between theory and practice. How far does this hold ?

Hi @surya713 – yes, UX draws heavily from cognitive psych and in my experience, the gap between theory and practice is not big.