Laura Cochran

Unlock Your Potential Today In the final years of my mother’s life, her greatest struggle was her inability to care for others due to her declining health.

She was a dedicated teacher and mother, always putting others before herself.

As we allowed her to finally rest, I realized her impact on our extended family and beyond. People shared stories of her generosity and selflessness, revealing how she had touched the lives of many. My mother’s life was dedicated to guiding and nurturing others, inspiring them to grow.

This realization has motivated me to create a meaningful legacy, helping others grow just like she did. That’s why my next steps are so important to me. That’s why launching a platform to support the growth of UX Researchers is the perfect way for me to honor her legacy.

Introducing UXR.DESIGN In May 2024, Reggie Murphy and I announced the launch of UXR.DESIGN , a platform we hope will help individuals advance their careers in UX Research by empowering them with the knowledge and confidence to succeed.

We understand how important it is to grow in your career, learn new skills, and become a leader that influences others.

Grow

By sharing expertly curated UX Research resources, guiding you through every step of the research process, from research design to confidently communicating insights, we will unlock your potential.

Inspire

By sharing people’s transition and growth stories, we will reveal unique perspectives and ideas for the future.

Connect

By creating this platform, we will elevate diverse voices and give people a way to share their thought leadership with others.

The Origin Story My collaboration with Reggie started as colleagues and evolved into a strong friendship built on shared passions. We met learning design thinking methodologies together, conducting generative research and prototyped experiments to better understand how people consume news for information and entertainment.

Even after we both pursued other career opportunities, Reggie and I stayed in touch. We often shared resources, which gradually led to keeping track of information in a spreadsheet.

Over time, the spreadsheet grew and Reggie made it public. The response from researchers and designers was astounding. The modest spreadsheet had an outsized impact!

Eventually, Reggie decided to take things a step further to turn the spreadsheet into a website so the information was more findable and usable. I was interested in doing the same, leading the way in designing UXR.DESIGN .

Our Approach We wanted to create this site with a people-first approach and a focus on the user. As leaders, Reggie and I have experienced different levels of support for UXers as we navigated our careers. It’s not always obvious how to advance to the next level or understand the expectations at each level.

The site is organized in a way that lets you grow your technique at each stage of research: research design, conducting research, analyzing the data, creating deliverables and the leadership and storytelling skills that help you communicate your findings.

What this Work Means to Me Personally UXR.DESIGN is my way of creating a meaningful legacy, of giving back to the UX community. This year I joined the DIA Design Guild as a mentor and focused my energy on launching UXR.DESIGN . I’m just getting started in my effort to serve the community, paying it forward for the many leaders who took me under their wing.

I love a side hustle

In 2008, when I transitioned from being in a newsroom to being “newsroom adjacent,” I launched my business so that I could continue to stay grounded in my purpose. Being an entrepreneur on the side gave me an identity beyond my corporate career.

Growing as a Designer and Strategist

UXR.DESIGN is a platform that could impact the lives of many people looking to grow as a researcher. Designing it end-to-end gave me the opportunity to stretch across research, design and content strategy. It also helped me as a leader, driving forward this work during a complex time for Reggie and me. Both of our lives were changing, but UXR.DESIGN was the constant. We remained committed to its launch.

Exploring New Publishing Platforms

This one is going to hurt my Wordpress friends. UXR.DESIGN was designed and launched on the Webflow platform. As a longtime Wordpress fan, it was the first time I experimented with another platform.

I love Webflow’s focus on system design. It was refreshing to spend time thinking about page templates and components again. The Webflow CMS is also really flexible, allowing you to build out a content model from scratch and customize it to meet your needs. Since the site is only successful if the content is findable and useful, the site needed a solid content strategy. Then, the CMS was customized to support this strategy.

We Would Love Your Contributions If you have a resource that has helped you grow in your career or a story to share, please let us know .

As practitioners, we are always striving to expand our knowledge. Reading is an excellent way to accomplish this goal. We might read to gain a deeper understanding of a particular method, or to learn about a new framework that can help us facilitate discussion and build consensus.

The majority of the content available on this website has provided us with the knowledge we needed to move forward. We hope that it will do the same for you. Our careers didn’t happen overnight, so let’s go.

Make your first move today!

Originally published on Medium.

Laura Cochran

New York, New York, United States 2K followers 500+ connections

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UX Research, User Experience Design (UED), Interaction Design, Career Development Coaching, and Training

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