Project Overview
The purpose of this survey research was to find out more information about technical communicators and ux professionals. This research was conducted with a teammate for graduate study. We wanted to explore what technologies technical communicators and ux professionals were proficient in, what personal characteristics were important to them, and what learning methods they felt they had benefited them most throughout their careers. Our findings would guide our own career paths, but also provide academic practitioners with data to tailor course and program design to the needs of real professionals.
Skills
Primary Research
Survey Design and Development
Data Analysis
Data Visualization
IMRaD Report Writing
Tools
Qualtrics Survey Software
Microsoft Office
Project Details
Qualtrics survey software combines sophisticated data analysis tools with an easy-to-use interface for both survey respondents and researchers.
Survey Design & Participants
We created research questions to determine our goals for the project, then we created our survey based on these goals. We then disseminated the survey to ux professionals and technical communicators. We solicited participants by posting a link to the survey in LinkedIn groups for ux professionals and technical writers and tweeting the survey link with relevant hashtags. We also targeted individuals on LinkedIn who self-identified on their profiles as currently employed in the fields of technical communication or ux and asked them to take the survey and share it with colleagues. We had a high response rate and our participants were very involved (many wrote us with suggestions and further insights).
Data Collection & Analysis
To explore how specialization and experience level impacted participant's income and the personal characteristics, learning methods, and technologies they valued, we used the crosstabs feature in Qualtrics. The following images show some of the Qualtrics crosstabs views we utilized to analyze the data.
Drawing Conclusions
Once we had gathered and analyzed the survey data, we created graphs and charts to visualize the data. We used these charts and graphs to display a clear and compelling visualization of
our findings.
College ranked low in importance as a learning method among all experience levels. Self-learning and on-the-job training were the most important learning methods for respondents.
Major Takeaways
Self-learning was very important. Technical communication programs should be sure to teach students how to teach themselves.
While technical communication programs shouldn't spend time teaching ever-changing tools, students need to have the opportunity to learn them.
The personal characteristics professionals value most are those that are assets on a project team: time management, initiative, detail-orientation, critical thinking, and problem solving.
The higher salaries earned by UX professionals may indicate that demand is higher than supply in the emerging field of UX. Growing trends toward product customization may be causing companies to place a higher premium on user-centered research and design.
Top technologies were similar for both specializations. Designers reporting using creative tools, such as Illustrator and Adobe CC, more frequently.