Anyone who’s tried navigating a poorly marked hospital wing, a cluttered website or a seemingly endless phone tree can appreciate the value of designing systems and products with the user in mind.
That’s where psychologists involved in user-experience (UX) research come in. Their job is to make interactions in these domains as easy, safe, intuitive and enjoyable as possible, employing psychological knowledge to design and test products and systems to enhance users’ satisfaction.
“It’s all about understanding how people think about, perceive and behave in the world, and designing products and systems that match that,” says Colton Turner, PhD, a human factors specialist at Priority Designs, a product development consultancy in Columbus, Ohio.
This skill set is becoming increasingly hot, as more and more organizations, institutions and companies see the importance of providing a good experience for their customers, says psychologist Barbara Chaparro, PhD, head of the Research in User eXperience (RUX) Lab at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.
“It’s no longer just big tech companies that are hiring these people—it’s everybody,” Chaparro says. “There’s a growing awareness that it’s important to understand end users in whatever products [companies] are creating.”
UX jobs can now be found in nearly every arena, including technology, academia, education and medicine, adds psychologist Susan Weinschenk, PhD, chief executive officer of The Team W, a UX consulting firm in Wisconsin. Her clients include Target, Best Buy, the Walt Disney Company and other Fortune 500 companies, as well as government entities including the European Commission, medical facilities such as the Mayo Clinic, colleges, universities and more. “The work is so interesting, and so much fun, and I think it’s really useful to our clients,” she says.
While not all UX practitioners have degrees in psychology—they come from areas as diverse as visual design, computer programming and interaction design—a psychology background, particularly in human factors, is a significant advantage, Chaparro adds. In fact, UX is considered a subspecialty of human factors, which applies knowledge of human capabilities to the design of systems, processes and products. UX, meanwhile, focuses specifically on the end users’ experience with a product or system, and includes measures of their attitudes and emotions, she explains.
Thanks to their training, many psychologists enter UX positions as researchers rather than designers, applying their extensive knowledge of human capabilities and propensities to user testing, Chaparro adds.
“Cognition, perception, sensation, motivation, attention, emotion—all of it comes into play in this work,” she says. “It’s all about understanding people.”
Product development and systems design
UX psychologists can facilitate people’s ability to easily, safely and pleasurably use almost any conceivable product. At Priority Designs, for example, Turner evaluates home goods, medical devices, sporting goods, construction equipment, hardware and soft goods—items such as soft luggage and carrying cases—both for in-house designers and for external clients.
His first step in any project is talking with designers, engineers or project managers to learn about the initial product design or prototype and to glean ideas about the intended customer base. In evaluating the design of medical devices, for example, Turner focuses on the users’ unique needs and challenges, such as cognitive, physical or environmental limitations that may impact their ability to use the device safely and efficiently. Next, he gathers data on potential users, which often means conducting surveys and interviews. This may include on-site visits to get a sense of users’ task demands—for example, those of nurses who will be using the device in a hospital setting. Finally, he tests prototypes with potential users and shares the resulting information with designers and engineers, who refine the design based on his findings.
In a similar vein, Mikki Phan, PhD, heads a research team at Google that helps to design high-tech products like smart speakers and smart thermostats. Drawing on her UX and human factors backgrounds, Phan and her team evaluate these products in terms of task difficulty, the time it takes to complete a task and other usability factors.
“Smart-home devices are a fast-growing tech area,” she says, “but there are still a lot of research gaps in how to make these devices ‘smarter’ and integrate more seamlessly into people’s daily routines. So, the area is ripe for UX and human factors researchers to contribute our knowledge and experience.”
Another growing arena for UX practitioners is working within or for systems. At Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, for example, Sarah Fouquet, PhD, works as a human factors scientist and program director, helping to address UX issues affecting the hospital’s two diverse user groups: pediatric patients and their families, and hospital staff. Her projects have included helping to reconfigure an emergency room to create better flow for medical personnel working in a tight, chaotic space and testing the user-friendliness of electronic medical forms with providers and patients.
In one such project, Fouquet and her team had physicians complete a new computerized medical form in the presence of staff who were playing the role of patients and their families. Physicians were frustrated at having to divide their attention between their computers and patients, she found, and the staff playing the patient/family role picked up on that. As a result of this feedback, the hospital is rethinking the form’s design and including the opportunity to fill in some of the form outside of the patient’s room.
“You can design the world’s greatest form,” says Fouquet, “but if it frustrates providers and alienates patients, it’s not going to be a great experience for anyone.”
In another systems-related project, Weinschenk is helping a community college address a growing concern for many institutions of higher education: how to retain students. One way to do this, she finds, is by making the student experience easier and more enjoyable. To this end, Weinschenk is helping the college develop a systemwide strategy to incorporate UX into the wide range of projects and services that students access, including software apps to sign up for classes and a website with detailed descriptions of course offerings. Her overall goal is to infuse a UX mindset throughout the college. “I’m not just helping them do one little thing,” she says. “I’m opening them up to the idea that this is something important for the organization as a whole.”
A boom area
UX psychologists find the work gratifying because they can use their psychology background to work on interesting projects that reduce people’s frustration and enhance their enjoyment and safety—often while earning a great living, says Weinschenk. According to the job-review site Glassdoor, the average base pay for a UX researcher is $93,152. And there’s no shortage of these jobs: In October alone, the employment site Indeed posted 4,400 UX researcher jobs and 8,998 UX designer jobs.
And the area is only likely to keep burgeoning, Chaparro predicts, as more and more companies become interested in what she calls the “end-to-end” experience—the user experience from start to finish.
“It’s no longer just, ‘Is our store arranged correctly, or does our website have the right information on it?’” she says. “It’s more about the whole process: ‘How did the customer hear about it? How did they first get to it?’” Growth is also expected in the medical field, as the need for safer, more user-friendly equipment and systems continues to expand, she and others say.
The bottom line: UX is a fortuitous job domain that combines identifying universal, ongoing needs and finding new and creative solutions for them.
“The way I think of it is, if people ever stop using things, UX will go away,” Turner says. “And I don’t think people will ever stop using things.”
