Design x Kevin Liang
Founder of Zero to UX, UX Researcher, and Mentor
Illustration by Bonnie Kate Wolf
Interview conducted by Tasnim Merlin on August 20, 2020.
Tell us about yourself and the moment you discovered you wanted to be a UX Researcher.
My name is Kevin, and my background was in biology and psychology. I didn’t know the world of user experience (UX) existed in all of my undergrad life. I was trying to be pre-med because of my Asian parents. I graduated with a biology degree and worked in the psychology lab at Stanford, but it wasn’t really what I wanted to do. People said, “Hey, you’re pretty good at helping people with their life problems. You should be a therapist!” So that’s the path I was going towards. I got the training and did a lot of research in psychology, but it’s heavy work. I couldn’t see myself doing it for the rest of my life.
One day, just serendipitously, a tech company gave me a call. At this point, I was going after the therapy route—I’d never thought about tech. So when a tech company called, I was like, “Okay, let’s hear what you’ve got to say.” That’s how I discovered that someone with my background could work in tech.
I didn’t get the job, but that was okay because that helped plant the seed. I was interested in applying my skills from psychology to building products or services that can reach the real world. What I was doing back then was long-term academic projects that may not see the light of day. The tech world is where you can actually build real tangible things. That’s why I wanted to apply my skills to become a UX researcher.
How did you create your YouTube channel Zero to UX?
When I discovered UX, there was a time when I had to learn on my own, apply to jobs, go through all the rejections, and learn from it all until I eventually landed my first UX research job. I didn’t think anything of it, but a lot of people started messaging me on LinkedIn saying, “Hey, I noticed you’re a UX researcher. What is that? How’d you get in? Can you give me some tips?” I would get at least five or ten every week, and then more and more. I’d type the same thing to people every time, so I thought, “Okay, I don’t want to keep copying and pasting when I can just make a video.” Ironically it stemmed from laziness.
It’s ironic because there’s a lot of work that goes into YouTube videos. I mean, I love it and I can’t complain. But the funny thing is, when I recorded my first video, I was just dreading the camera. I was so awkward. I spent four hours recording 20 minutes. I rewatched it, I cringed watching myself, and I scrapped it. I didn’t touch the video for another year.
I finally started the channel when I was taking a leadership and management class at Bentley during my master’s program. One of the leadership projects our professors had us do was create our own UX leadership project. People did 360 evaluations of themselves, maybe talked to their manager to see how they could improve, or helped the community in other ways. For me, I had this idea of making a YouTube channel for a while, but fear and impostor syndrome had always stopped me. So if it weren’t for that class, I don’t think I would have tipped over the edge, and launched the channel.
What is the main purpose of the channel?
The main purpose of the channel is to give valuable, accessible, curated UX research content for free, in a fun and creative way. It’s to build a community of what I call “the badass UX leaders.” People think of researchers as people in white lab coats but that’s not the case. I want everyone to understand that the journey could be difficult, but it could also be a fun one. I try to make it a fun journey for folks, and give it my own spice. It’s basically the channel I wish I had when I was transitioning into UX.
How would you describe your role in Zero to UX?
Currently I do everything you see on Zero to UX. What you don’t see is scripting, video editing, doing all the research. I also have coaching services, resume reviews, and a community I’ve built. I have a Slack channel and Instagram account, so I try to engage with my followers that way.
I get my ideas from people’s comments and questions, so I pretty much never run out of ideas. I started this for fun, to try to help some people and never thought I’d get more than 100 viewers. Anyone can suggest a video idea, so if you have any, let me know!
What advice would you give to fellow juniors transitioning into the UX research field?
Learn systematically through courses and books. Once you understand the world of UX and the fundamentals, practice solving real-world problems. While your degree or your certificate is good to have, people will ultimately hire you to solve problems, so you have to showcase it through a portfolio of some sort.
Another piece of advice, especially with the reality of just transitioning during tough times like this one, is just to not give up. I think it can be quite difficult. If your plan doesn’t work, change the plan, not the goal.
“If your plan doesn’t work, change the plan, not the goal.”
Don’t get discouraged just because you get rejections. They’re not a bad thing. They’re a form of redirection. It is really a mindset shift. This goes for anyone, not just UX. If you’re applying to jobs and you’re getting rejections, that doesn’t reflect on you as a person. Failure only exists if you don’t learn from it. To improve, get feedback on your interviews or your projects, and you will be more ready for the next interview.
I see a lot more folks getting interested in the research side. If you go to Google Trends and search up UX research, you’ll see the interest level has more than quadrupled over the past five years.
UX research has changed since you started until now. Are companies also more aware of it, and are they realizing the importance?
Yeah, I think you nailed it. A lot of companies are realizing the need for a specialized UX research role for the first time. I actually spoke with America’s largest tire distributor company, and they didn’t know what UX was. I gave them a quick crash course, and at the end of the call, they asked me, “Do you want to come to North Carolina?” The point is, a lot of companies are learning about it indeed, and it’s a different way of thinking.
There’s a lot of interest in research, but there’s some misunderstanding of it as well. People might think it’s easy, just interviews or usability testing or surveys, but it’s the scientific method, with its applications to growing businesses, essentially. Researchers need critical thinking skills, pattern recognition, and synthesis skills, which could take time to develop practice.
What skills besides UX research are important to this field?
That’s a great question. I think UX researchers are successful if they have five additional skills. There’s leadership or influence. There’s communication skills. There’s the ability to take a step back and look at the big picture—zooming out into the business and drawing parallels to solve problems.
The fourth thing is creativity. People think only designers can be creative with their work, but researchers can be too. Things like budget and time constraints just force you to be creative. You have to think of different ways to solve the problems. Researchers can do some thought exercises on how to do something differently to get those creative juices going.
The fifth one is not really a skill, but it’s more of a characteristic—it’s being humble. Humility is important because when you’re working with many different stakeholders, you shouldn’t seem to know it all. You have to really communicate with them on the same level. Know what they want, and then address it that way. If you’re using hyper-jargony terms like cognitive dissonance or p-values or statistical significance, they won’t care. They just want to get to the point.
How can we get better at being creative and thinking of different solutions, so we’re not following a strict process?
Sure, there might be a process to follow, but I would treat it more as a guideline, because you’ve got to know exactly why you’re doing things. Especially when you’re presenting portfolio projects, they don’t care what you did—they want to know why you did things. When you’re thinking of those reasons, you can kind of preemptively think, “This is the problem. Here are options for different methods we can use to approach it. Here’s the pros and cons of each and how they weigh together. Maybe we can combine them.”
Ultimately, think ahead. What is it that we want out of this research? Work backwards to think, what would be the best approach for this? Don’t go with the solution first, don’t go with the method first, because it might not fit for the problem that you’re going after. In order to get to that level of thinking, you’ve got to master the fundamentals. If you have the fundamentals, you can carry those skills for a lifetime. Then you can start tweaking your methods by getting creative and adapting methods.
There’s an Einstein quote. Basically he said if he was given 60 minutes to solve a problem, he would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking of solutions. So that’s a good way to kind of summarize what I just said.
What is your advice on learning new skills, taking courses, and applying that to real-world experience?
Hiring managers care more about what you can show than your degrees and certificates. So obviously you have to learn first before you can start diving into a project. I think one tip is, read the basic books that introduce concepts in human–computer interaction. Read articles, websites, or Medium posts about the methodologies and learn how they work. And at some point, you’ve got to start diving in. Work on side projects and feel free to make mistakes and learn from them, just so you can get your feet wet.
Once you master fundamentals, continue getting inspiration, follow UX folks online—on Medium or LinkedIn. They give a ton of great tips. If you can find a mentor, they can give you feedback, help curate your journey, and help get you where you need to go.
I don’t know if this applies to everybody, but the last thing I would say is, once you master the fundamentals, start learning things outside of UX.
Shameless plug: I have spent the past three years creating a UX Research Master Class under the radar. I’ve been piloting it with a few people for several months, and I’ve gotten feedback from other UX researchers to build the most valuable class about UX research. It should be ready by early 2021, and people can sign up on my website.
What are ways can we draw inspiration?
There’s this concept called the adjacent possible, introduced by Stuart Kauffman in 2002. It basically means there’s something at the edge of what you’re doing that captures the creative potential of innovation. If you expand your own knowledge boundaries, then other boundaries will expand along with it. Here’s a real world example.
We take design cues from Mother Nature. The Japanese tried to design an efficient train, but found that traditional designs just didn’t help. They’ll still be too slow and waste a lot of gas. An engineer on the team who happened to be a birdwatcher was just watching a kingfisher bird catch fish. When it dove into the water, it barely made a splash, and it just clicked in his head. He said, well maybe we can take the design of the beak and apply it to a bullet train. It only came to him because he looked at the world in a different lens.
One more example would be Velcro. An engineer was walking his dog when he noticed these plants clinging to his dog’s fur. So he examined this, and he then invented Velcro.
These are examples of how biomimicry influences design, which I love because I’m a biology nerd. It’s just mind-blowing. There are things in nature that just work, so if we just analyze them just things around us, components start to click. But the point is, you can draw inspiration from places outside of UX. If everybody learns the same thing, design is going to be all the same and nothing’s going to be unique.
“If everybody learns the same thing, design is going to be all the same and nothing’s going to be unique.”
What are some different backgrounds of people who have broken into this field?
I just recently interviewed my friend Brian, who works for the Federal Reserve Bank. He’s a UX designer with a background with graphic design, so it’s not very far off. But I come from a biology background. There’s psychology, cognitive science, sociology, anthropology. I know an English major, a lawyer, a doctor, and an Olympic badminton player.
There’s so many different fields. I think the point is, can you solve problems critically, think through the design process of using research to ideate, work in a team to continuously discover opportunities, and ultimately solve problems? It doesn’t matter what your background is. Anyone can learn UX because there’s so many accessible resources out there. Anyone can educate themselves online or through books, do their own projects, practice, and get a job.
How can you influence people who might not understand the value & time commitment of UX research?
The best argument for UX research is to show the value by doing it. Don’t just say, “UX research is important!” If you can show how a few interviews or how quick usability tests can change design and have impact, you can build trust by showing the impact here and there.
A second way that I’ve done in the past is asking product managers and team members, “What have you done in the past? How did you come up with this design?” More often than not, they’ve probably done some user research, whether they know it or not. This is the principle of consistency, from Robert Cialdini’s persuasion principles.
Educating people of different methodologies is really important because there’s that myth of UX research being just interviews, usability testing, and surveys. There’s so many more methods that people just don’t know about, and when you educate them, you open up their eyes.
Another myth I would like to add is that research takes a long time. But if you don’t do it now, you’re going to spend a lot more time fixing it later. Taking an extra week might sound very long to stakeholders, and sometimes research requires multiple weeks to answer a question. Stakeholders might try to ask the sales support team about customer feedback, so we can just improve it based on that feedback. As researchers, we don’t want to discount the sales team’s feedback—it’s useful, but we also want to dig deeper. So just know that it could seem very long, but there are also a lot of methods that you can adapt that are shorter, like unmoderated studies or user testing, that can be finished in a couple of hours. That’s just something that stakeholders might not know about, but you do, because you’re a researcher.
What are some good research tools out there?
I have a video on this. There’s a lot of platforms, and every tool has different capabilities. Common tools for usability tests are UserTesting and Zoom. For diary studies the most common one would be dscout, and for card sorting it would be Optimal Workshop. For surveys, there’s Qualtrics, Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, and Typeform. They all have their own pros and cons, and you can pick the best depending on your needs or budget. If groups are analyzing stuff together or doing affinity mapping, MURAL is a good one. Airtable is good for organization. Trello can double as a productivity tool and a card sorting tool—that’s a small hack. For data, I personally just use Google Sheets.
What are some ways that researchers can make their portfolios easily scannable, especially for text-heavy research?
Hiring managers only have so much time to look at portfolios, so you need to capture and showcase exactly what they want to see in around 10 seconds.
You need the background—what is this project about, what is the objective, what you’re trying to do with the research. List out your methods and maybe give a sentence or two about why you chose those methods. Talk about the impact of your work and what happened after you did your research. Essentially, if you’ve ever read academic journal articles, it’s like you’re writing the abstract.
A portfolio focusing on user interface design might just utilize research done by a researcher, like “Research shows XYZ,” and it would focus on the design decisions that were made based on research. The most important thing is why you designed things the way you did, and the answer is research.
For the researcher portfolio, you want an emphasis on what your problem was, what methods you chose, and why. Why did you choose those methods? Why did you choose the sample size you chose? What other methods would you have considered if you had more time?
But the similarity between the two types of portfolios is to tell the story in a streamlined way and explain why at every step.
On that note, is it possible to be both a researcher and a designer?
Absolutely. A lot of companies hire designers to also do the research, especially if they don’t hire researchers. This is going to be tough. You’re just going to be strapped for time and heavily buried in work. But a lot of startups have it. Oftentimes, designers know how to do the process on a high level, but if they can also pick up skills in deeper research methodologies and learn why they’re using it, then they can be a “UX unicorn.”
How would you describe your leadership style?
There’s a quiz based on Daniel Goleman’s six styles of leadership that I took, and my top styles are affiliative, then democratic, then coaching. What that means is basically creating emotional bonds and harmony between people, spreading the love, making sure people work together, and knowing well that not everyone gets along but finding some common ground between everyone to achieve a goal. It’s best known for getting people to work together and motivating people during stressful times.
In my own words, I try to follow the age-old proverb of teaching someone to fish, rather than giving them the fish. There’s also a quote from Nelson Mandela about how a good leader leads from the back of the line. They shouldn’t see you as someone who’s taking control all the time. A leader should trust their followers.
“A leader should trust their followers.”
But there’s so much to leadership. Goleman’s styles might address the core style overall, but in certain situations you might want to adapt it.
Rapid Fire Questions
What is something you’re looking forward to?
I miss going out to restaurants and going out to coffee. I do a lot of my YouTube thinking there. I don’t like to be in the same space all the time, so I definitely miss that. I miss just meeting friends and hanging out.
I’m looking forward to seeing where the channel grows, how people are benefiting from all this content, how I can improve it. I’m also looking forward to where your website goes and just how UX is growing.
I just look forward to hearing people’s stories, and I try to share that on my channel too. I’m just one story, but everyone has their own. Just making Zero to UX relatable is another goal of mine. It’s called Zero to UX for a reason—it’s not called Kevin Liang’s channel. I look forward to meeting people like yourself, and people I wouldn’t have ever met if I didn’t have this channel.
What is a hobby you have?
I’m a huge car person.
