The simple answer to that is yes, it does help. The reason it helps is the UX design process includes user research, so it would always be helpful, but it’s not a compulsory part of the UX research career.

The UX research career now is completely separate, so it spins off from UX design and now it’s a full-time career which is really growing in terms of the methodologies, the processes of UX research, and there are so many more methods now to find out user needs. So because it’s such an intensive piece of work in each project and each user’s journey for discovering those problems, so it’s become a full-time job. So now you can jump straight into your UX research or user research, and you don’t need to know UX design anymore.

What are the differences between being a UX designer vs. a UX/User Researcher?

• Now when you are going to study UX research as a career, your focus needs to be deeper than if you were just going to be UX design because UX designers do user research, but they don’t have to be experts in it. So they’ll carry out what is really basic user research.
• UX researchers, on the other hand, compared to UX designers they need to learn every method like card sorting, tree testing, focus groups, interviews, heat maps, click testing, all the methodologies they must learn. Whereas UX designers wouldn’t be expected to know everything or learn all the processes and that’s because they have so much more work to do with user flows, user journeys, wireframes, prototypes, working with developers, so it’s a different ball game.
• Now you do work closely together, so you will always work together, almost hand in hand in terms of finding those user needs, discussing them and your job as a UX researcher is to talk to the user designer or UX designer on a regular basis, even sometimes a daily basis, and talk about what did the user say here. So the UX designer will build something, design a prototype and say, “I can’t remember what the user said about this button, what colour did they say? What was the preference or where should it be in the information architecture to lay on the page?” Then you as a user researcher will remind them of what the user said or what the majority of users said and if you can’t remember, you can just say, “Look, I’ll get back to you and you will go back and check and say, OK, I just checked my records, my report, and they said that they would like the change the button from green to blue, for example.”
• So those types of changes come from the researcher, and I’m just explaining how they work together and they work in tandem. So it’s really up to you to decide which route. The UX Design route is much longer if you want to go that way, it will take your time to learn UX design and then get into UX research.

UX Design or UX Research — Which to Choose?

Now, if you want to understand which one you should do, UX design or UX research, it really depends on what skill set you would like to really enhance.

UX Design

So UX designers must know to prototype. They don’t necessarily have to know code, but you must learn how to use Figma or Sketch or even code into those prototypes, so it may require coding in certain jobs like interaction designers. They know a bit of HTML, CSS, so they know some code, but you don’t have to know that, but you do know how to prototype a design.

UX Researcher

Now, UX researchers don’t learn anything about prototyping. They’re not technical at all. So if you want a non-technical job, then UX research is for you. If you want a mid or semi-technical job, that would be UX design.

Conclusion

Now both are enjoyable jobs, I’ve done both and I enjoy UX research more, even though I do miss some aspects of UX design, such as wireframing. I love building those solutions, those designs based on user research. But overall I love UX research because I love this interview, those focus groups, listening and capturing the qualitative and quantitative data.

Now it’s really up to you how you choose to get into UX research. If you choose the direct route, then I would suggest checking out www.interaction-design.org, because it will really help you to understand the basics and the process of UX research, so that will help you to get directly closer to your career goals.