I'd been a UX researcher for six years and had a small but specific reputation in the diary-studies sub-niche of the field.
I gave maybe one or two talks a year at conferences. This one was at a UX research conference in Boston in late autumn, a five-minute lightning slot I almost didn't apply to because it felt too short to do the topic justice. The talk went well. The audience was about a hundred and twenty people, most of them researchers, and the questions afterwards continued in the hallway for a good half-hour. Two of the people who stopped me were from the company's UX research team. They told me they'd been looking for a researcher with diary-studies experience for several months and hadn't found anyone they wanted to talk to. Could we talk later that week? We talked the following Tuesday. It was an informal conversation with the head of research, no formal interview structure. We talked about their work, my work, the methods they were trying to use, and where the team was struggling. By the end she said she'd like to put me through a real interview process if I was open to it. I was. The process was three interviews. The first was a portfolio review with the head of research and one senior researcher. I walked through ↓