UX Research Inspiration For 2021

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

It’s 2021 already, could you believe it?

I feel like we all could use some professional inspiration towards a new and promising year!

This is my super short, nerdy and minimal list of amazing professionals I personally follow. This list is obviously NOT comprehensive, and I wish I could include more people in it (maybe I WILL in my next post)! 🤓

Many times this year, I found myself looking for some good news, I guess it sounds familiar :)

When I come to think about it, I wasn't looking for just good news, I was looking for professional inspiration as well and so did other colleagues I was talking to.

So I thought it could be nice to share this list with y'all, I hope we could get it bigger and richer together! (Add your lists as comments here, or on our Facebook page).

You can also watch it in our video here:

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Don Norman

@jnd1er

https://jnd.org/

Don is one of the founding fathers of UX. Much of his work involves the advocacy of user-centred design. He has done so much, I don’t even know where to start from.

He wrote famous books like: “the design of everyday things” and “living with complexity” “emotional design” and many other amazing classics.

Indi Young

@indiyoung

Medium

Indi is a Design Strategy & Inclusivity Researcher, an author, a trainer, and a founding partner of Adaptive Path.

She’s a problem space researcher and she’s helping digital clients find opportunities to support diversity. She wrote a few books- “Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior” and “Practical Empathy: For Collaboration and Creativity in Your Work”.

Nikki Anderson

@productherapist

Medium

This lady is amazing, Nikki is based in Berlin, she’s a lead qualitative UX researcher at Zolando. In her spare time, she’s also an instructor and a writer. She is a wonderful source of knowledge, I highly recommend following her Medium account where she writes very often about UX research. She also founded the “User research Academy” Slack group where people can talk about everything UX and research related topics.

Tomer Sharon

@tsharon

Medium

Tomer was the Managing Director, and Head of User Research & Metrics at Goldman Sachs.

He’s the author of “Validating Product Ideas: Through Lean User Research” and “It's Our Research: Getting Stakeholder Buy-in for User Experience Research Projects”.

Tali Rosen Shoham

@talirs_ux

Tali is a UX research manager at Google and she also the co-founder of WE ,

the largest community for female UX professionals in IL

In her twitter account Tali is sharing stories from her life, her political views and her professional thoughts.

Dr. Shuli Gilutz

@ShuliGilutz

Site

Shuli is a UX researcher focusing on Children's Technology. She is a teaching Fellow at

Tel Aviv university. She’s a UX Expert at Google Launchpad and on top of that, she’s also a board member at the “Designing for Children's Rights Association”.

Tricia Wang

@triciawang

Medium

Tricia is a global tech ethnographer living at the intersection of data, design, and digital. She is based in Brooklyn, New York if you want to learn more about her and how she thinks, make sure not to miss these talks-

Speaking — Tricia Wang and this video is just too cute not to share- Tricia Wang: Global Tech Ethnography

Dr. Noor Ali-Hasan

@noor

Medium

Noor is a UX research lead at Google. She’s a qualitative researcher with over 15 years

of experience shipping consumer products at Google. Her focus is on Google Play

Movies, Games, & Books.

I really enjoy reading her thoughts on Medium, I think she’s really interesting.

Noam Segal

@noamseg

UX Quests

Noam describes himself as a father, and a director of User Research at Wealthfront.

He owns a PhD in Psychology from UIUC. He’s also a professional burger and pizza Taster.

I don’t know about the last two, but I know I really like to read his tweets.

Since Covid-19 he opened a Youtube channel and started to host UX people on it.

There are some very interesting people I met via his channel, so thank you Noam it’s been really insightful.

Saswati Saha Mitra

@SaswatiSM

Medium

Saswati is a Research Leader at WhatsApp. You can follow her Medium account which is quite interesting and also on twitter. I actually found out about her via Noam Segal’s Youtube channel. She has a great article “Undemocratising User Research” where she shares her experience and thoughts about democratising User Research.

Kate Towsey

@katetowsey

Kate is a Research Ops Manager at Atlassian . She’s also a curator at Rosenfeld Media, and if that wasn’t enough for you to follow her, she’s currently writing a Research Ops handbook.

I can’t wait to put my hands on this one!

She also has many interesting research related lectures on youtube, really cool lady!

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2020 was one of the most challenging, fearful and saddest years for many of us.

Covid-19 was a big challenge which humanity is still struggling with.

Having said that, 2021 looks like it could get better - some very smart people have found a vaccine, and people have started to take it so I hope that soon we will be able to meet in person, have meetups, conferences or just hang out together without panicking…

So that’s it, that’s the end of my geeky list, but I want to make a deal- Let’s make this list as diverse as possible- I want to add UX researchers from all around the globe.

Which UX researchers do you follow? Let me know!

I’m counting on you!! 🤟

Aya❤️

👉P.S- You can help me make this list even greater by sending me your lists!

You can leave it as a comment here, or on our Facebook page.