A couple of weeks ago, I attended Michael’s company’s holiday party.  I got caught flat-footed by Michael’s boss, when he asked me the basic question, “what do you do?”  “I’m a researcher at VMware,” I answered blithely.  “What do you research?” he asked.  And this is where I made my mistake: instead of the elevator pitch for user research, I instead answered the question as if it were about what products I’ve worked on.  But that wasn’t the answer that he was looking for, which Michael realized more quickly than I did.  “User experience,” he helpfully pointed out, which at least pointed his boss in the right direction.

User experience is a term that still doesn’t have widespread understanding, even when you’re standing in a roomful of Silicon Valley software engineers.  This is more true for research than design, since most software engineers have at least encountered an interaction designer at some point in their career.  Researchers are more rare.  There’s only three of us at VMware, so I’m never surprised when someone doesn’t know what a user researcher does.  Over time, I’ve developed my elevator pitch for what I do as a user researcher, but I somehow didn’t give that answer this time.

My current elevator pitch is this:

I study how people use things, and figure out how to make it better.

Sometimes I replace “things” with “applications” or even “our products”, but I like “stuff” better because it’s less precise.  There are words that I deliberately don’t use in that pitch, such as “user” or “usability”.  I also make sure that I connect the study with the outcome of making improvements.  It also opens the door for additional conversations, if the questioner is interested.  But if not, it’s a reasonable encapsulation of what I do and why I do it.

And next time, I’ll remember to use it, even when I’m surrounded by my fellow geeks.