Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Kristin Lin

I’ve never been one for words. There’s a piece of feedback that my teacher wrote on my 1st grade report card that still sticks with me today: “Excellent student, but doesn’t talk in class.” That description became how I thought of myself for the majority of my childhood. And in truth, I was horrified at the thought of speaking in public. I was afraid to voice my own opinion for fear of having a different one from everyone else.

I carried these fears around with me throughout my childhood, even as I was elected my high school’s National Honor Society president during my junior year. I may have been chosen due to my “nerd” status, but I was still a quiet girl who avoided public speaking at all costs. Put into this situation of having to speak in front of a large group of people on a regular basis, I knew I had to find a way to lead, even though I wasn’t comfortable with it. I overcame this fear by listening to what others wanted and then speaking on their behalf. Slowly but surely, I became less nervous with my own words as I realized that I could be the voice of my peers.

Years later, I found my first job at an education technology startup as a designer. I had the opportunity to work directly with teachers and students in their classrooms to design an online learning experience. In that role, I was able to form a close relationship with our users, which enabled me to rapidly test and create new designs with their feedback.

After a few more years at the company, I was thrown into Product Management and given the responsibility of defining our product roadmap. I had maintained a close relationship with our users from being a designer, and strongly believed in using their feedback to drive our product development. However, as time passed, I found myself mostly building timelines, managing 2 week sprints, and creating documents that were more about what we were building instead of why we were building it. At the end of those 5 years, though I had grown immensely as a person and learned a ton about the education space, my role had become less user focused and more business focused. I found myself losing the passion that I had when I first joined the company.

Realizing I wanted to be closer to users and user experience but not knowing how, I took a leap and quit my job. I took my new free time to think about the next step in my career path. One piece of advice that really resonated with me during my break was “to figure out what you really want to do, figure out what you are doing when you aren’t doing anything.”

Forgiving a few Netflix binges here and there, the introvert in me was surprised to find I actually wanted to be around other people during my time off. I created a workout app and filmed my more active friends doing their daily workout routines. In the process, I drove up to Canada to connect with my cousin who I hadn’t seen in 10 years. I started going on photography hikes with friends and friends of friends. It gave me a chance to talk with people on a regular basis, deeply understand who they were as people, and capture those moments on camera. I realized that in the midst of working through the startup grind I had lost many of these important relationships in my life.

After a few months of soul searching, I came to visualize the world that I wanted to live and work in. It was a place where I could make an impact on a product and organization, while still being able to capture human stories. I also wanted to maintain a close connection with my colleagues instead of being in a place where I would get lost in a company of thousands. I had a feeling that a role like user research at a small company would be the way to do that.

Though it seemed promising, user research was somewhat of a gamble. I had run usability tests with users, interviewed students and teachers on a weekly basis, and created focus groups to understand teacher needs in the classroom, but it wasn’t ever my official position, and that scared me. Was I qualified enough given that I had not been a full-time researcher? Could I use any of the skills I had gained as a designer and product manager? I kept those questions in the back of my mind, but I realized that user research was a risk I was willing to take.

To prepare for my job interviews, I pulled from my past and what I knew best: all the users who I had worked with in my previous roles. I realized I could talk about users all day — their stories, what drove them, why they did what they did, what they liked, what they didn’t like, and how we designed our product to fit their needs. I remember going to my job interviews feeling excited that I could share my previous experience working with users and leaving feeling confident that this was what I wanted to do moving forward.

At Digit, I’ve found a place where I can work with a small team of mission-minded people. I’m surrounded by people who care about what our users have to say, and are passionate about building a product that will help people save money in novel ways. Here I can be the voice of real people on a daily basis, and really dive into why they use our product, how they think about finances, and specifically why saving money is so important to them. This helps to influence not only the product and how specific features are built, but also how the organization understands and talks about the people who use our product.

Talking to people living in very different environments around the U.S. has also been crucial in helping us build a personal finance product that serves everyone, not just those in the Silicon Valley bubble. Sharing their stories has helped me grow in my role as the liaison between our users and our company, constantly figuring out ways to bring the two perspectives together. Though there are definitely still challenges that I run into as I continue down my path as a user researcher, I’ve been grateful to have the space to constantly adapt and learn in this new role.

If you’re interested in making the switch to user research or have recently made the switch, let me know below. I’d love to hear about your story as well!

My transition to user research was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My transition to user research

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