"Breaking into UX Research: Nassir Mohamud's Journey from Family Therapy to Security Guard to International UX Researcher"

Breaking into UX research without formal training can seem impossible, but Nassir Mohamud's story proves it can be done. Learn how he leveraged transferable skills from past work in therapy and security to get a foot in the industry door. Nassir recounts his incredible journey into the field, including using his savings for an intensive UX course and overcoming an injury to motivate him to enter the field. He also shares lessons from early gigs, a startup stint, and leading UX research at an international agency. Throughout his career, Nassir focused on honing core skills like listening, storytelling, and innovation. Aspiring researchers can find motivation and practical tips in Nassir's against-the-odds journey. He advises seeking high-quality mentorship opportunities, being aware to not force shiny new methodologies where they perhaps don’t belong, and understanding teammate roles and priorities.

Brandon: So can you tell me a bit about your background? How did you first get into UX research?

Nassir: I have no UX experience in any higher education settings. In the UK, I completed college, and by "college," I mean something different than what it typically refers to in the United States. I haven't attended university yet. At the age of 19, I spent three uncomfortable months at Greenwich university because my grades sucked and I was placed through something called clearing. Essentially, if you don't receive good grades in a particular subject, they place you into any university for any course. This resulted in pursuing a degree I had no interest in, which was a terrible experience for me. If you're doing something you don't want to do, what's the point? Consequently, I dropped out, realizing that it wasn't worth the tuition fees. I decided to explore other options, eventually finding my way into systemic family therapy. This was my first step towards UX research, and you'll see the connection later on.  For three years, I volunteered and studied systemic psychotherapy, specializing in family therapy at the Prudence Skynner clinic at Springfield University Hospital. After completing that, the next step was to seek accreditation from an institution. However, a barrier existed because I lacked an undergraduate degree, a requirement for accreditation. At that point, I was 23, and I felt I needed to prove myself. I took on a job in security to sustain myself and perhaps fund another program down the road. It became a full-time job and not just a temporary solution. This shift in my plans continued until 2021. The transition to UX occurred due to a pivotal moment in November 2019. I suffered a serious knee injury while working in security. Newly married and only four months into my marriage, I faced the prospect of being off work for several months with no income. This downtime prompted me to reflect on my career choices. I decided I wanted to enter the field of technology, inspired by my six years of working at Facebook (now Meta) as a security guard. During my time there, I developed relationships with people in various departments, including engineering, products, and sales. In a conversation with a friend who worked at Facebook over a game of Call of Duty, I expressed my desire to leave my current situation. He encouraged me to explore UX design, pointing out my aptitude for observation and communication, given my background in college and an illustration course. Intrigued, I began considering a transition to UX design. So it took me just a week where I was trying to find a course, find out what UX is, what does it mean, what does it stand for. And I liked the idea of it. I wasn't taking time to solve it. So I found two courses, one cost £2,500 and the most expensive one was £5,000. I remember at the time, when we had £5,000 in my budget, I said to my friend, “Dude, I want to do £2,500.” And he said something that stuck with me until today. He said, “If you pay cheap, you pay twice. If you're going to invest in a future like this, you need to go for quality over being safe.” So I took everything I had, I literally spent my whole savings into the course that lasted 11 months. So it's not a UX certification that you get in like six weeks. It was 11 months. So I completed it in February of 2021, and shortly after that, I started to get to contracting. And I was very lucky because I had a few friends who could say, “I know a guy who knows a guy, they can use UX to do the contracts as a junior.”  And then that's how it came up. 

Brandon: So you had a choice of doing design or research, and you chose research. Can you tell me why?

Nassir: Yeah, because it reminds me a lot of therapy. There's a significant overlap between therapies and UX research, where both involve communicating with people to understand their stories. In therapy, we used labs in a mental health setting, which mirrors the UX labs today. These labs include one-way mirrors, cameras, and transcriptions. This connection reminded me of a past space in my life. Listening skills became crucial, something I was learning and never truly mastered, but it brought me happiness to speak and learn about people, their stories, and various therapeutic approaches. Understanding the human brain was the most rewarding aspect for me. Now, regarding the gigs I worked on, one opportunity came through a friend who observed my dedication to studying day and night during our 12 hour shifts. He knew someone in the field, an old-school designer with years of experience. This connection led to a contract opportunity with the Department of Education in the UK through the Government Digital Service (GDS). The contractor, limited in resources, offered to help by providing me small tasks. I agreed. The task involved conducting heuristic evaluations on a set number of web pages and documenting and reporting them in real-life settings under supervision. The contractor paid me £50, which, in hindsight, seemed low, but I did not care, I was so grateful for the opportunity. Despite the modest compensation, it was a valuable experience, involving data entry, shadowing, and learning through lectures and by doing. The contractor guided me, sharing insights into his work and providing valuable lessons. This initial gig was a stepping stone into the field, marking the beginning of my journey into UX research. So, as I'm thinking about it, there were two aspects to how I entered the field. The first was more of a mentoring relationship, a mutual sharing of applications and experiences. The second was a project I initiated myself. I knew someone who managed a community center that has a lot of community members and activities, especially in the summer. Summer's been a big time for him. So I remember having a chat with him and he said, “I have these problems that I'm trying to deal with”. He needed someone to help him digitize a booking process for coaches and families for summer trips to Brighton beach. So I said, “How about this? Can you give me an opportunity to apply what I learned and help you with this problem?” That was the first time that I was actually able to apply everything I learned. That lasted two months, and there were lots of learnings. I was able to do everything, end to end, designing things at the time that didn't exist before me. I was doing generative research and whipping up wireframes, the whole lot. I was putting up the experience maps, testing out the real thing that people receive when they get in. The point is to get this experience. Companies have to hire somebody who actually knows what they’re doing, and I didn’t know shit but I was applying my learning and willing to be coachable. 

Brandon: So, moving into full time work, I want to talk about that aspect of your career. Can you tell me more about how you transitioned from the gigs you did to full time work?

Nassir: I think the biggest thing for me was that I definitely don't want to be a designer. That was my biggest thing. I definitely didn't want to be a designer. I was like, okay, I've tasted a little bit of it and I wasn’t really enjoying designing. I was enjoying the conversational data gathering side more. So I was like, okay, I need to really invest into that. So I didn't start work until June of 2021. But, I was really struggling to even get an interview, because it's really tough! So, the same friend of mine who told me about UX, said to me, “why don't you put your portfolio out on Twitter and start networking?” I'm very much an introvert. I don't really like going out there and speaking to people. So I struggled with the idea to get up to it. I just had to follow as many UX people as possible within the space. The first post about my portfolio that I put up gathered good momentum. So lots of people saw it, lots of great tweets and lots of comments. I first heard from an early stage startup in the United States of America, in Tampa, Florida. Then they moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma. And it was a very early, early age startup. I interviewed as a junior designer and told me that they weren’t looking for research at the time. But I said, if you have space for research,I would love to step in because I knew I could do everything. Luckily for me, they were very understanding, and were open to having a few people who essentially have little to no experience. They allowed me to do my thing at that company. I lasted six months because the company ran out of cash! but in hindsight, a lot of what I was doing was not really research.

Brandon: A lot of people are looking at startups as potential places. And I know the work is very different there than, say, bigger companies. So can you tell me a little bit about how what you were doing was not research?

Nassir: I was doing everything. If anything, it was probably more like a business analyst role. You're doing everything. You're in decisions when you're talking about marketing, you're talking about to the budget team, you're talking about investors, how to pitch, design, but most of the research work I was doing was really secondary research. I was barely doing the primary research. I think the only primary research I'd done was surveys and just very, very, very low-level user testing. There was no such thing as generative or structured research. And that was on me of course. And obviously, there's no one else there that actually had such experience. I was literally just studying, upskilling on the side and trying my best to apply things that are relevant to the skillset needed for that role. So I was doing everything else really. I was even doing design critiques. We had no set design or research process, so I had to basically just speak to a bunch of people outside of work, learn from them,  and then try to apply that knowledge into my work. And that worked out more because during conversations with management we’d talk about our processes, I could suggest a lot of improvements. 

Brandon: That’s great, because I’m sure you learned all types of things about the development process and everything that goes into it. 

Nassir: Yeah, it was very scrappy. Very rough.

Brandon: So can you tell me more about what happened next in your career and how you took that scrappy start and applied that to the next stage of your career?

Nassir: So again, it was a weird time, and I went back home to see family in Kenya. I remember the date very clearly, November 27, 2021. and that's where I knew I needed to get a new gig very, very quickly, because I have a family to feed. So I applied online, and I got the job so quick, and I was so shocked how far I came. I think it was just, again, it's just the market was so good that it was just a good time to get in. Most of the companies that were calling me back, and I had so many interviews in one week. One was with a company called MVF, which I spent the last year and 10 months with. I just got laid off from them, only a month and a half ago, well, and they were a great company. They were the best teammates I ever worked with. I have no words to describe it. But that was different, even though I was the only researcher again. There’s a trend here, because I was the only researcher at the first start, and now I was the only researcher at a much bigger company. They were not start-up, they were scale-up, but when I joined them, they had a team of designers. The design team was 12 people together, comprised UI designers, UX designers,  product designers and creative technologists which just means basically designers who can code. So they're basically unicorns. So walking  into that world was very different, because they had a researcher previously who had only stayed there for a hot second before she left. So it was down to me to just carry on with what she started, really. So that was the first time I was exposed to transcription tools and research specific tools. That was the first time I was exposed to that. Prior to that, I was doing things really, really scrappy at the startup. I mean, at one point, I remember I uploaded videos to YouTube, and then transcribed it there, and then copied it to excel, and then from excel, I copied and pasted it into a Miro board. So this was the first time I actually was able to access budget funding for recruitment tools, research, purpose pools, transcription, repository, the whole shabang. So that was fun, and they gave me a lot of space to grow. Extremely supportive head of UX as well. Plus we there was an extremely supportive design manager, and they were all very open to innovation. One of the core values of the company the innovation, and so that allowed me to innovate. So a good example is that, typically, a lot of researchers have one method to report back to their stakeholders, or to their project sponsors, via Google's slides or on our platform. So it’s mostly decks, most of the experience was decks. They allowed me to move away from decks and use what we're using at the time, which was Dovetail, which I think is a great tool. I think it's fantastic. I don't think it's perfect, but they allowed me to innovate and say, you know what, I want to use Dovetail to report, as opposed to just boring decks, I want to use it to report, using their features. So essentially, it looks like a news bulletin. It's amazing, because you can integrate the videos, the tags, everything in just one place we can put everything in there, match it up and make it look great. So they allowed me to do that. They weren’t on my case about sticking to slides. They just said, “Do whatever you need to do to do your job right.” And that works fantastically well. 

Brandon: How is your identity as a black researcher shaped your career path and experiences? 

Nassir: It's a strange one for me. I'm not too sure. And I say that because growing up, I was exposed to serious racism. I have a brother that’s one year older than me, and I’m not old, I’m 31, it’s not like I grew up in the 80s. But I was exposed to some serious racism back then as a child growing up in South West London. But then as I grew up, of course, these changed. But in a professional setting, I don't think I've ever actually given it a thought nor have I experienced anything negative. This is the first time I'm actually thinking about it. I don't know what to say other than that. I think there's a potential lack of representation from what I've seen, from my network on LinkedIn. I believe I have a good network on LinkedIn. Lots of amazing people I see everyday on LinkedIn, and I realize, there’s not many Black folks in UXR. Not many folks that look like me as a researcher. From my perspective I see more of us in engineering. 

Brandon: With that being said, what advice do you have for young black professionals or professionals in general interested in getting into UX research? Are there any recommendations regarding your education or gaining experience, anything like that?

Nassir: Absolutely. I have very strong views about how you conduct yourself at the very beginning. I say this all the time to my younger sister. She's wonderful. She's trying to get into UX as a designer, and even though she's, you know, an amazing psychologist, she'd be an amazing researcher, but she just doesn't want to do it. But I would tell her what I'm telling somebody else. You must, must, must get access to reputable mentors. There's a lot of people that are doing mentoring that should not be doing mentoring. People who don't have enough experience. I've been approached many times, people might say, “hey, could you be a mentor?” I don't have any experience. I'm sorry. I don't want to mislead you. I don’t want to mislead anybody. As a matter of fact, I'm the one who's being mentored. I think I'll be mentored for years to come.  You’ll be taught things that are battle tested and you’re learning from people who have been there, done that for enough time. They've been exposed to many different scenarios within user research.. So you must find good mentors. You could find one on the ADPList, but again, there are people I've seen that should not be doing this. I said I say that from my experience. So, I might see someone with one year experience and they’ll be a mentor. I think it's pretty dangerous, you know? So I use ADPlist, but I make sure I do my due diligence. Again, when I go out to find a mentor, I must do a background checks. I have to know they have experience and I have to know why I'm doing this. You've got to be deliberate and intentional. Don't just come up and say, “Yea, I want to have a conversation”. No, you have to know why you’re having this conversation, but also, be genuine. Don’t just expect people to find time to chat with you because at the end of the day, no one knows you anything, right? The second thing I'd like to say is don't go too crazy with methodologies. Don't go bananas with it. There's so many methodologies out there. But in the real world, you realize you’re limited to a few, and that might be due to various reasons. One of them might be company restraints, right, budget restraints, or it might be because of the product. The product doesn't need ethnographic research, for example, while other businesses might really need ethnographic research. So I would say don't collect them like Pokemon cards, just do the basics. Desk research, surveys, interviews and especially usability testing since that is one of the core functions of user research.  And don't go crazy. Don't try to force methods. The last thing I'd like to say is to understand how humans work, especially those who you work with. For example, stakeholders/ product managers, understand their role and understand what goes on in their world. If you can understand the nature of their work and how they do it and what they need to learn to do their jobs better, it’ll make everything so much easier.