What defines a good UX researcher?

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Anonymous · Accepted Answer

-There are several things that contribute to success as an user researcher. By
this, do you mean cognitive skills or personality traits ?

From personality perspective,

* Learning/ Growth mindset. In the end, we're paid to learn in the first place,
   so this is crucial. For this I believe, someone who wants to be successful as
   an user researcher, should do the following thing, read voraciously, reflect
   on work he/she is doing through structured frameworks, apply outside work,
   engage in critical evaluation of user research work and innovate

* Patience :  As uxrs, we often have to face situations which will test our
   ability to stay calm be it in stakeholders This becomes critical, when trying
   to influence change in stakeholder decision, or even to kick off . Eg when I
   had joined this, the space i am working has limited understanding of research
   and even design. Typically we need to kick of requirement gathering before we
   can proceed with study but this time, the stakeholder wasn't giving me the
   time. I was told just talk to users and the delay started happening every
   other day. Now at this point, one would feel frustration and try to escalate
   but I stayed calm and started changing tactic, first tell the pm, why we need
   to do this and how it will help pm(product development if we focus on the
   wrong thing). And I had to repeat this in various ways, finally pm gave time
   and that too at 11:30 pm at night .
   
   Patience is also my primary tool for building rapport, especially with
   participants who need more time to articulate their thoughts or who tends to
   deviate from topic. I once interviewed a participant who went off-topic to
   share a personal struggle with new tool launches. Instead of redirecting them
   immediately, I practiced active listening. It led to insight, how new tools
   are launched iwthout much announcment and how it affected the user work. 
   This built a level of trust that allowed them to eventually share deep,
   unscripted insights that normal interview would have missed.

What defines a good UX researcher?

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