What Does a UX Researcher Actually Do All Day?

A UX researcher does not ask people what they want and build it. The job is the disciplined uncovering of why people behave the way they do inside a product, and it looks like nothing you would guess from the title.

The first thing worth saying about UX research is that the job people imagine when they hear the title, the one where a researcher asks people what they want and then builds it, bears almost no resemblance to the work. People are famously unreliable narrators of their own behaviour, they will tell you they want one thing and reach for another, they will describe a feature they would supposedly love and never touch it once it ships, and a researcher who took users at their word would spend a career building monuments to things nobody does. The real work is stranger and more interesting, because it is the disciplined uncovering of why people behave the way they do when they think no one is watching, and the gap between what they say and what they do is the seam the whole profession mines. Le