Recruiting participants for a research study can sometimes be time-consuming and energy-draining, especially for products and organizations that do not have a pre-screened customer base or community to reach out to. In this article, I’ll share a recent experience in which we were looking for a very niche user group…

How did I get so lucky to have a day job like this? — I graduated from school in December 2021 and started working full-time in January 2022 as a UX researcher at EchoUser, a San Francisco-based UX consultancy. In the last year, I worked primarily with a client that makes software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, and design industries…

A multi-disciplinary approach to problem-solving — My journey of getting into design research was quite a zig-zag path, but I was fortunate to have found a place where I got to validate my career aspiration. I mentioned that the two semesters I spent at Live Well Collaborative, a design and innovation consultancy confirmed my interest in…

How I changed my perspective on government work this summer — Prior to this summer, I had very little understanding of how the U.S. government operates. Politics scared me away and I certainly didn’t have any positive experience dealing with the U.S. government. My social security card got lost in the mail after I applied for it. I tried to find…

In April 2021, Lookback, a UX research platform collaborated with UXRCollective (now Learners) and put together a 6-week fellowship to uplift junior researchers who already have research skills and knowledge but are having a hard time breaking into the competitive industry. I was extremely lucky to be selected as part…

I finished reading Elizabeth L. Cline’s first book on the impact of fast fashion a while ago. It debunks the myth of “doing good” through donating your clothes to Goodwill or the Salvation Army as most of those clothes will go straight to the landfills after a short shelf time…

17-year-old Greta Thunberg has Asperger’s syndrome and sees almost everything as black or white. “If the emissions have to stop, then we must stop the emissions. To me, that is black and white. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival. Either we go on as a civilization…

I lost count of how many times I teared up reading Jeanne Marie Laskas’ To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope, especially during such time when the entire world is on fire. During his 8-year presidency, Barack Obama received ten thousand letters a day from ordinary American citizens. His…