Illustrative Reference profiles for a generic digital health care organisation, not official job descriptions. About this reference.

User research methods

User research involves methods to identify user needs and understand how users interact with a product or service.

Quoted from the UK GDaD PCF.

Levels

1. Awareness

You can:

  • explain some basic user research methods
2. Working

You can:

  • plan and conduct a user research project, with support
  • understand when to use basic user research methods and how to apply them correctly
  • effectively involve your team in research activities
3. Practitioner

You can:

  • use a wide range of user research methods, and can help teams to adopt them
  • plan user research for services with challenging user needs and complex user journeys
  • advise colleagues on the choice and application of research methods to assure best practice
4. Expert

You can:

  • help an organisation adopt a wide range of user research methods
  • lead a community of practice to help an organisation continually assure, improve and innovate their user research

Contains public sector information from the UK Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework (https://understand-digital-data-roles-skills.service.gov.uk/), licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. © Crown copyright.

Closest ESCO skills

Contains ESCO v1.2.1 data (https://esco.ec.europa.eu/). © European Union. Reuse authorised under Commission Decision 2011/833/EU.

Role levels that expect this skill

Role levelRoleBandExpected level
Associate user researcherUser researcher4Awareness
Junior user researcherUser researcher5Working
User researcherUser researcher6Working
Senior user researcherUser researcher7Practitioner
Lead user researcherUser researcher8bExpert
Head of user researchUser researcher8cExpert