Dear Hiring Manager,
I am applying for the position of UX Researcher listed at Indeed. I have a Ph.D. in Technical Communication and ten years of experience in teaching at the college level. I have two engineering degrees and an MS in Technical Communication & Information Design, which emphasized HCI and user experience. Currently, I am an assistant professor, and I teach UX to masters students.
In addition to teaching, I manage the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s UX lab, where I help multidisciplinary faculty and industry to run various user research studies through the different design phases. As a part of my duties, I run workshops for faculty and students to aid participants in better understanding UX and how UX is leveraged in various situations and contexts. I pride myself as a leader who enjoys and embraces collaborating with other departments, external partners, and teams. One of our recent projects examined how quickly users can find information based on its architecture (i.e., tables, cards, bullet points). During remote usability tests, users were asked to look up specific information from differently formatted databases. In this instance, A/B testing (using t-tests) revealed that tables helped users find the information the fastest and most accurately.
My broad experiences with teaching and helping students implement their UX projects has given me exposure to a wide array of methods and processes including prototyping, contextual inquiry, task analysis, focus groups, and usability testing, as well as first click testing, card sorting, and tree testing. I have worked with remote communication tools and mobile UX software. I am familiar with remote user testing platforms and remote communication.
I am an expert report writer comfortable with dissecting information for insight. I use stats to improve my analyses and graphics packages, like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, to help showcase my results. In one recent project, I helped to uncover 300+ teachers’ sophisticated digital practices via extensive surveys and interviews and communicated these complex practices by distilling user workflows to understandable charts for dissemination. As an instructor, engineer, and previous digital media director, I am comfortable working in all kinds of teams and communicating with various levels of audiences.
I find the potential to work on a collaborative UX team for an educational organization a unique and refreshing opportunity. I welcome the chance to use my expansive skill set to help address complex educational issues. I want to request an interview so that I might further demonstrate my potential value.
Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you regarding this opportunity.
Sincerely,
Joy