The central question:
Is it possible to map the researcher’s journey from initial, curious flicker to that article published in a high-impact journal? If so, what tasks intervene?
Mathias Burton, the Senior User Experience (UX) Designer for Researcher Tools at ProQuest, tackles these questions by building user profiles. The webinar “Researching Researchers” explores the way these profiles help him and his team better understand how researchers’ goals and tasks change over time.
So, where’s the map? What are the tasks?
Mathias and his team have identified three key “influencers” on the research experience. According to Mathias, those are institution type, discipline, and career stage. To give you a taste of the UX thinking Mathias employs, let’s take a look at each of the career stages. They provide a roadmap of researcher growth, with each profile building on the skills of the preceding profile.
The first profile is the Novice Researcher. The novice is probably a freshman or sophomore undergraduate who is mainly concerned with finding a topic, understanding it, and writing about it.
The Gen.-Req’er is a little farther along academically than the novice. She’s interested in earning good grades.
Mathias Burton's five researcher profiles:
- Novice Researcher
- Gen.-Req'er
- Domain Learner
- Apprentice
- Seasoned Scholar
Contrast the gen.-req’er with the Domain Learner, who understands that learning about the field of research is important for more than just grades. She sees the ways it might help with her career and life in general.
Typically, the Apprentice represents a graduate student. She’s looking to make a name for herself through publishing and teaching, while the Seasoned Scholar is a faculty member. She publishes, teaches, applies for funding, collaborates with other scholars, and tracks her own and her peers’ citations.
Takeaways:
Understanding each profile’s goals allows Mathias and his team to design features in a targeted, thoughtful way. While the profiles themselves may provide a bit of insight into the researcher’s journey, in my opinion, the most fascinating thing about this webinar is the way it allows us to look behind the scenes at how Mathias puts the profiles together—through listening, observing, asking questions, and striving to understand a stranger’s needs.
To me, that’s the main takeaway. It’s an object lesson in structured listening, and maybe, to put it a bit more grandly, in empathy.
