Antin: Top user researchers must master five specific multi-method tools
Judd Antin · The UX Research reckoning is here | Judd Antin (Airbnb, Meta) · Jan 4, 2024 · at 17:44
Judd Antin, former research leader at Meta and Airbnb, describes the essential skill set required for modern user researchers to Lenny Rachitsky.
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“So the best researchers I think are, first of all, multi-method. The first iteration of user research was primarily a qualitative discipline, but a strong opinion that I have is that is largely one of those models that needs to evolve. It's not that qualitative user research is no longer important. It's that the best researchers have five tools. I think they have five tools and those five tools are number one, What we would call formative or generative user experience research... The second type is evaluative, right? So more like usability testing. The third tool is a basic rigorous survey design... But to do that, you have to have the fourth tool, which is applied statistics... And then in the old version of this, the fifth tool was SQL because I think good researchers need to be able to run their own queries. These days, so much of that is dashboarded that the fifth tool may now be prompt engineering”
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