How Volunteering could help you to become a UX Researcher
Volunteering is an unpaid activity with a lot of benefits for our mental health and self-development. As a volunteer, we try to help and solve the problem of the issues from others and in return, we could get a positive impact after doing the volunteering job especially for our Psychic. We could be more grateful, and also, our empathy will be gradually increasing as we try to put ourselves into others' shoes. But what if volunteering could help you to become a UX Researcher?
But first, Let me explain about UX Researcher!
According to CareerFoundry, UX Researchers has their hand on the pulse of user needs and goals. UX Researcher is mainly focusing and discussing the first stage of the design thinking process: empathize.
Basically, UX Researchers will be participating a lot in empathizing to define, prototype to test, and one thing that UX researcher will be participating in is monitoring the current product then researcher it to gain user paint points and product development.
But, What is the correlation between UX Researcher and Volunteering?
So as you already know, UX Researcher has to use their empathy and is a must for UX Researcher because they need to observe and obstruct user pain points, need, and motivation while communicating with the user within the research.
Based on the Nielsen Norman Group website,
Empathy enables us to understand their immediate frustrations and hopes, fears, limitations, reasoning, and goals. It allows us to dig deep into our understanding of the user and create solutions that will not only solve a need but effectively improve our user’s lives. Empathy itself has several spectrum that you need to know first.
In other words, Nielsen Norman also mentioned on his website that.
Empathy in UX is Essential, It allows you to design with intent, introduce focus and clarity, advocate on behalf of our users, and challenge our assumptions.
By knowing the importance of Empathy in UX Researcher, we could increase or enhance our empathy by joining a Volunteering program. 😁
When we become Volunteer or doing a volunteering job, we usually will face a lot of people from various background, and most likely you would be involved in the real world issues and will be taking action directly to the centre of the issues to help them and support what they need to live. From that, You will likely have a conversation with the people over there who face the issues directly.
By having this conversation, I believe that you will feel what they feel because you are in the same place and live on the same roof with them. You also would gain their effort to live, their problem, and you will likely gain their needs because it is also what volunteers would like to get to help most properly. From this point, The interaction between you and the citizen will increase your empathy gradually.
Every time you had an interaction, you had communicated and lived with them, you will notice that you steadily become a socially-minded person. And because you are steadily becoming a socially-minded person, it means that you will likely be more empathetic to others. You feel like you know the hardship of the people over there to overcome the issues that they are facing. These skills will help you a lot while doing research such as a User Interview or even field studies because you have already used to talk with people who have a problem and have to tell their needs and pain points to help them.
Then How about the impact of volunteering on my Career as a UXers?
It is really impactful and helpful because I have the motivation that drives me a lot to be able useful by delivering a good product that will solve their pain points and satisfied their needs at the same time. I also noticed that as a UX Researcher, our social mindset and empathy are used a lot in every research that I had done before. So These past experiences as a Volunteers really help and motivate me to help others as much as I can.
How about you? Do you feel like you need a Volunteering program to increase your empathy for your career acceleration?? Feel free to comment and discuss it on Medium. Thank you 😊
Reference :
Sympathy vs. Empathy in UX (nngroup.com)
What Does A UX Researcher Actually Do? (Career Guide) (careerfoundry.com)
