The User Research Round-up - CW3

2024!

👋 Hey, Nikki here! Welcome to this 🔒subscriber-only 🔒 User Research Round-Up with the world’s most creative, helpful, new, and informative user research-based articles, podcasts, events, books, and academic resources sent straight to your inbox. 

---

Wowzers, it is 2024, and the holidays are officially over. Did it go super quickly for anyone else? I swear I blinked, and it was gone - poof, kapow, alakazam! Getting back into everything is kicking my butt a little. There feels like a lot of pressure to be “off to the races.” People keep asking me about my 2024 resolution (hint: I don’t have one). And social media keeps serving me inspirational quotes that are anything but.

Let’s give each other permission not to be on the ball a few weeks into the new year, shall we? Deal.

Anywho, I wanted to give a quick shout about my six-month mentorship program.

I struggled a lot as a user researcher to the point where I almost quit and pursued a completely different career. Luckily, I found a few mentors who helped me understand my weaknesses and what I could do to improve my craft while also embracing that we all sometimes feel like impostors.

That’s why I created my mentorship program — to help you with every problem or struggle you come up against (including venting about stakeholders, of course) so that you can feel the confidence you deserve. So that you can go for that pay rise, promotion, or the job you’ve always wanted. In my program, I am there for you every step of the way — I’ve got your back, and I’m in your corner.

If you want to experience this level of support and growth, hit the button below to check out everything you get (watch the behind the scenes video to get a real look into how in works and how much support you get from me because words sometimes can’t describe it well enough):

Thanks for bearing with me! Now to our regularly scheduled programming!

---

01.

Mental Modeling: A Qualitative Method for Mapping Audience Behaviors and Designing Social Marketing Initiatives (Article) by Valerie Malzer and Sarah von Schrader

This article is a super interesting approach to segmentation and thinking about peoples’ behaviors. Valerie and Sarah detail their approach to mental modeling and how they use this to understand their audience better. They also give a case study example within the article, which I found really helpful in understanding and applying the theory to UXR.