Common Research Mistakes (and How to Fix Them)

For a long time, I used to hide my mistakes. This double-edged sword of a trait goes back to when I was a kid and would do everything in my power to ensure no one saw me mess up. And, if they did, the tears would come.

As I got older, this tendency showed up in different ways in my work. The good news? I learned from those mistakes and made my practice better than ever.

Jump to…

• My big career mistakes
• Common mistakes of people who do research
  • Not asking for feedback
  • Ignoring or being inflexible with the business
  • Not asking for help
  • Other random mistakes
• Wrapping it up

My big career mistakes

Fast forward to my first job as a user researcher. My manager tasked me with creating personas. I won't lie, I had no idea how to create a persona. So I Googled frantically—and I mean finger-breaking speed—what type of information went into a persona, how to design one, and what they were supposed to do.

I hid that persona and the 87 versions that came with it until the last possible second. Then, when I presented it, I got a lot of feedback. Feedback that would have been helpful about a month prior when I had started my secretive journey of creating the personas.

That wasn't the last time I made that mistake or countless others. But I still hid them in this little box of shame I carried around in the back of my mind.

As my career continued, I had to reckon with this perfectionist attitude. Of course, the tears still came, but usually in bathrooms or once I made the trek home from work. This mindset set me back considerably in my career because, with that fear of mistakes came a fear of failure and, ultimately, of sharing.

The significant shift came when I joined communities and heard whispers that I wasn't alone. Other researchers felt this enormous sense of impostor syndrome, undercutting doubt and crippling fear that people would view their mistakes as a giant sign of failure and that they shouldn't be in this field.

Eventually, I hired my first intern. She was awesome, super helpful, and trying to break into the field. I was thrilled to manage someone finally and help them in their user research career.

Then, I saw in her eyes, actions, and how she spoke that same fear that still plagued me: the dread of messing up. At that moment, I knew the best thing I could do was share all my mistakes, all the failures I'd encountered along the road, and mess-ups.

I needed to normalize failure and making mistakes.

Since then, I have happily shared as many mistakes as transparently as possible, and there have been many (I mean many) throughout the years. As scared as I have been to fail, watching other researchers get stuck in a cycle of self-doubt and impostor syndrome scares me even more (one of the many reasons I started my membership).

You aren't alone in making mistakes or failing. It is what makes you uniquely human. So, let's wander down memory lane to see the big three mistakes I've made (and observed others doing as well) that have made me the user researcher I am today.

Common mistakes of people who do research

✔ Not asking for feedback

Feedback was the scariest thing in the world for me to receive. I was constantly terrified I would get negative feedback on something—even though that is okay and how we learn and improve.

I wanted everything I produced to be spot-on perfect. Very rarely is that the case, especially as a user researcher. You are creating things for other people, and, to ensure you include the information they need, you must ask for feedback.

Like my secret persona journey, I would do the same for reports or presentations. Unfortunately, it got so bad that I even stopped asking for feedback on research plans, which is against the whole point of research plans as we use them for collaboration and alignment.

I was so fearful of someone not liking something that I did that every time I had to create anything, I was under a high degree of stress.

I've seen other researchers hold this similar space. Sometimes we have to fight so hard for people to value our work that we are worried doing something wrong will undo all that hard work.

To combat this fear, I recommend starting small and with trusted colleagues. For example, I created meetings with people I knew I could trust and had them walk me through their feedback in person so I could better understand the feedback (and the tone). I also shared with them ahead of time that I was nervous.

After doing this a few times, I could move on to more significant projects outside the scope of 1x1s. Now, I ask for feedback so much that it is probably annoying!

✔ Ignoring or being inflexible with the business

For a long time, I was all about the user. I am a user researcher after all. I would roll my eyes at stakeholders who wanted to test things in less-than-ideal ways, or didn't listen when colleagues spoke about business metrics.

I didn't care about business metrics. I cared about the user and the experience they were having.

As you can imagine, this didn't make me very popular with stakeholders, especially product managers. I remember speaking with my husband—he was then just another product manager to me—about painted-door (otherwise known as fake-door or smoke-) tests.

Before building, he wanted to test whether people would engage with a particular feature. With a painted-door test, the user clicks on what looks like a call to action. However, the button is a dummy, triggering nothing but a popup explaining that feature is not yet available, along with a tracking event for you to monitor.

I was furious. What kind of experience would this be for our users? They would click on something and be disappointed. A button that went nowhere. It was a nightmare, and I wanted to tear my hair out. Back then, I fought against it.

Today? Maybe not. If the potential feature was backed by previous research, a painted-door test could help us prioritize what to build next. The thing is, it is expensive to build features. And if the feature isn't useful or doesn't solve a pain point, then it’s not generating any value.

If that's the case, we have just wasted money on something that will not be helpful for our revenue. And revenue is critical because it keeps the business in business, which keeps us having jobs.

I see many user researchers skirt around business just like I did. If we want a seat at the table, we need to understand that we conduct research just as much for the company as we do for users. We want to create a symbiotic relationship through our work.

To combat this mistake, I had many conversations with colleagues (my husband included!) to understand the business, what metrics we found necessary, and how I could help support users and the organization.

✔ Not asking for help

If I asked for help, it was a sign of weakness, a sign I wasn't doing my job well, a sign that I wasn't meant to be a user researcher, a sign that I had no business asking people to trust me when I didn't even trust myself.

I got to several points in my career where I nearly quit:

• Before I started, I applied to 75 jobs and heard a rejection from 11. The rest ghosted me.
• When I had to do a generative research interview for the first time, and completely failed. Then I failed several more times before I got the hang of it.
• When I spent months begging a product manager to do research and ended up recruiting the wrong people.
• When I worked across 12 teams trying to balance research, and often walked into a room having no idea what I was doing there.
• When a report came to me in utter distress, and there was nothing I could do for them.

I could have asked for help in most of these instances, but I was scared to. I didn't want people to see me as a failure or someone who couldn't do their job correctly. So I spent years stressing over doing everything autonomously (and perfectly) and kept my head down, even when I got so burned out that I didn't want to get out of bed.

I made guesses about things I shouldn't have guessed about, such as how to analyze a vital survey or what my stakeholders needed from my research. I made sweeping statements and generalizations about findings to make myself sound better. As a result, every decision-making moment was a stressor.

Eventually, I got to where I was okay with asking for help. I combated this by finding trusted colleagues (and sometimes peers outside of my organization) and using the "asking for a friend" question. I posted anonymously in groups to see what others would say.

All of this helped me slowly build my confidence to understand that asking for help was a strength, not a weakness.

✔ Other random mistakes

The mistakes above are more prominent, but here are some random funny (well, not so funny at the moment) ones that I have made throughout the years:

• Going into sessions with the wrong prototype
• Breaking GDPR because I CC’d 150 users in an email rather than BCC’ing them (I cried)
• Inviting the wrong colleagues to a workshop
• Completely butchering (multiple) interviews in front of C-suite and executives
• Recruiting the wrong participants for (multiple) studies, which led to useless data
• Running an affinity diagramming session when I had no idea what affinity diagramming was
• Writing multiple surveys filled with terrible future-based questions and made-up scales ("On a scale from one to ten, how much would you enjoy using this feature?")
• Asking leading questions during interviews ("How much would you like to use this feature?")
• Avoiding conversations with a manager I disliked for three months
• Not asking for guidance on my career because I was scared someone would tell me I was failing
• Refusing to listen to my interviews and assess them for the first year of my career because what if I sucked at them

Wrapping it up

I hope this makes you feel less alone in your journey. Remember that learning is never linear, and we are always on a path to improve, which means we can't do things perfectly the first time we try them.

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