Roles and teams
UX researcher
Also calledUser researcher, Design researcher
A specialist who studies how people think and behave so the team can decide what to build before engineering spends time on it.
A UX researcher plans and runs studies such as interviews, usability tests, surveys, card sorts and tree tests, then turns what they find into decisions the team can act on.
The role pays off by removing risk from the roadmap: a week of research that kills a bad idea saves months of building it. It is also the highest-variance role in a design team, because research that nobody acts on returns nothing at all.
Small teams usually have designers run their own research. A dedicated researcher starts to make sense once there are enough designers to keep one busy.
Common mistake
Treating the time a researcher spends sharing findings as overhead. Socialising the work is part of the job, not a distraction from it.