Jake Rhodes is the new UXRS Community Engagement Director

UXRS Community Engagement Director

Welcome Jake Rhodes, the newest member of the UX Research and Strategy board

Jake Rhodes has worked in technology all of his adult life but his experience working with software developers as a Technical PM at Microsoft opened the door for him to explore UX design and UX research full-time. Since moving into UX Research, Jake has worked on projects targeting a wide range of audiences including researchers themselves, consumers using Windows, to parents using family safety products. He is most energized by the process of understanding the motivations of customers and helping his team understand customer needs as clearly as possible. Today, Jake is a user researcher in Microsoft’s developer division, focused primarily on development frameworks and tools. He’s also an avid cook, woodworker, and carpenter at home - in many ways, It’s all the same work.

Side projects: Recently, he has become obsessed with understanding purpose motives in work, and the effects of technology saturation with learning and judgment. He is currently working on generative work in these areas separately from everything else going on.

Now let’s take a deeper dive with Jake and have him answer a few questions.

What attracted me to get involved with UXRS?
I was inspired by the spirit of openness, sharing, and support on the UXRS Slack channel. I have a deep, personal view that we as a discipline should be doing more to help new practitioners establish themselves and we should be doing more to share our collective body of knowledge with each other.

What’s your favorite UXR Event and why? 
For a variety of reasons, I was getting a little frustrated with how much I was having to rely on remote moderated studies and I was looking for ideas on how to run remote contextual inquiry for an upcoming project. As luck would have it, UXRS offered an event on this exact subject:  Deb Gelman’s talk on Remote Contextual Inquiry. It served as both an introduction to the faces behind the group of UXRS and it also served to broaden my thinking about how to adapt contextual inquiry methods to a remote context. I was inspired by some of her ideas and have used some of these approaches with recent developer projects.  


What do you see in UXRSs future?
Digital technology is expanding into every part of our lives and the need for ethical, human centered UX research practitioners is going to continue to grow. We also have growing interest in our discipline with new colleagues joining the UX research ranks from many backgrounds:  undergraduates, established academics, bootcamp graduates - you name it. I hope to be part of a UXRS future that is successful connecting researchers with each other and maximizing the impact of that economy.  
You can find Jake on social media: 
LinkedIN:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-rhodes-seattle/ 
Twitter:  https://twitter.com/UxRhodes
Facebook: gorhodes