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How to get started with The User Research Strategist Newsletter

Hey. Welcome to the real user research party. We’re basically best friends now.

Welcome. I’m really glad you found this place. Before you get dropped into a feed and left to guess what any of it is, let me give you the quick tour so you know where to go.

What I do, in a sentence: I help user researchers use AI, mostly Claude, to do the real work of the job, from planning a study to running synthesis to writing the report your stakeholders will actually read. I’ve been a researcher for years, I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way, and most of what I write comes from working out where AI genuinely helps and where it actually makes your research worse. If you do research and you’ve felt unsure about all the AI hype, I think you’ll feel right at home here.

Where to start

If you’re new to using AI in your research, I’d start with AI 101. I wrote it for people who haven’t touched any of this yet, so there’s no jargon and nothing assumed.

If you already use Claude and you mostly want to get sharper at it, head into Workflows & Deep Dives, where I share the actual workflows I rely on when using AI for user research work.

And if you’d rather have someone come in and set your whole team up properly, that’s what my workshops are for, and you can find those here, alongside my products and my Maven courses.

The five posts I’d hand you first

If you only have time for a handful, these give you the gist of how I think:

1. How to Use the Pyramid Principle to Write Research Reports

2. How to Track the Impact of Your Research

3. A UXR resume journey

4. Ten Ways to Make Claude Think Like a Research Partner

5. Use AI Across Your User Research Process

The rest of the map

Once you’ve found your footing, here’s everything else by section so you can follow whatever pulls you in:

• On the craft of user research, the methods and the messy reality of doing the work well

• User research impact, making your research actually change decisions

• Career, growing as a researcher and navigating the job hunt

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Free: The good stuff

• 1 article every two months

• 1-2 Podcast epis/vids every month

Paid: The full survival kit

Everything in free +:

• Substack Hub: my Notion brain dump with 40+ templates, scripts, mini-courses. Copy-paste your way out of blank-page hell.

• Private Slack community (I actually show up)

• UXR Tools Bundle

• Full Substack archive

• Weekly actionable as hell post via either an article, video, or audio

A lot of people expense this through their learning budget, so it often costs you nothing personally, and here's the doc that makes that easy.

See you on the flip side.

Stay curious,

Nikki