Georgia’s story begins in rural Suffolk, which she fondly describes as the “bump of England”. She graduated from the University of Norwich with a degree in history and politics. Her career has spanned from marketing dog food to working alongside the head of Prada. Georgia’s inquisitive nature and love of working with people brought her to a new role as a UX researcher at the Guardian.
How did you get into research?
My first job out of university was working for a digital marketing agency and, looking back, I certainly wasn’t the best at marketing. I would call places like the Telegraph and see if they’d like to feature a story about revolutionary dog food and, needless to say, they weren’t interested. I then got a job as a marketing and communications officer in local government working for Newham borough council but shortly after I decided I needed a change out of marketing. From there I started doing focus groups (self taught from my university’s YouTube page) and got a job at C Space. It was there that I got most of my experience in end to end research. I would conduct a huge amount of focus groups and research, namely on projects for Prada, Tesco and Kaspersky.
What led you to pursue a UX role at the Guardian?
I realised I wanted to specialise in UX research because it is in the tech space but requires more soft skills, and because I believe it’s more accessible to people. I also really liked that UX research is mainly dominated by women. I’ve been at the Guardian for 11 months now and I’m really enjoying it. It’s very different from previous roles because as part of a small team of UX researchers I have a lot of autonomy over my own workflow and get to run huddles with software engineers and product specialists.
What projects are you working on now?
At the moment I work across the journalism development and newsletter teams. Within newsletters we’re doing lots of research around how people discover and to sign up to newsletters. We also focus on the advertising and promotion of our newsletters, as well as the experience of how a user interacts with the newsletter content. In the journalism development team we are focusing on reducing customer confusion and effort, quite a juicy amount of work!
Which projects have had the biggest impact on the customer directly?
In essence my whole job is testing to see if customers are confident using our products and seeing what makes it easier for them to access what we’re putting out.
Most recently we ran a piece of research on the relaunch of our environmental newsletter: Down to Earth. In that piece of research we gathered information on reader perceptions of the relaunch including what they wanted to see more of, and what they thought of the new design and name, with results showing it had received a good reception.
Another recent bit of work we did was to understand a reader’s newsletter sign up journey. The research we did helped to remove a lot of the clunky steps and make signing up more straightforward. A revised sign up journey launched just last week.
As a woman in the tech space do you feel empowered to do your best work?
I do feel empowered but I also feel like that comes with age and confidence in your career. When I was younger I didn’t necessarily feel as if I knew what I was talking about and I think the beauty of ageing is you just grow into yourself. A lot of the people I work with in the UX space are women which is really encouraging. Overall, you need to be someone that is more personable and good at listening. This is something that is so important when you’re interviewing someone in a focus group or for a piece of research, to be able to form a relationship with a stranger and put them at ease in order to get the best from them.
Typically what does a day look like for you?
It is very dependent on the project that I’m working on at the time, but it can be a mixture of chaos and trying to smooth that out, over and over again. When I am doing research for a project I’ll have the research objectives in front of me and then (as any UX person will tell you) I live and die by a Post-it note. Once I go through the transcript of the call I highlight the interesting or important parts and I put them on Post-its all over my wall and I identify any significant themes that way. From that it grows into telling a story, which can be in the form of a presentation. I prefer it to this way as research can often fall a bit flat if it’s just a report with numbers, and the information may be lost on people who aren’t research literate. I think it’s best to tell a story because, as humans, we are natural storytellers and it lands better. When I’m doing preparation work I always check in with stakeholders to make sure we’re clear on the objectives and ask for feedback on discussion guides. Actually, doing the research means calls all day and then I would sit down with my team and we would watch clips and discuss and analyse.
Do you have any advice for anyone interested to get into UX research?
I want to stress that you don’t have to study design or computer science to get into UX. As a history and politics graduate, the critical thinking and writing skills I have learned were invaluable. I would encourage people who are interested in getting into UX research to do their own ‘mini project’, for example, maybe you want to understand how people use their local library and the pain points they experience while doing so. You could go into the library and ask or observe people, this could definitely help hone your questioning skills.
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