Patrick Ward

Background

About Patrick Ward

I never intended to become a user experience researcher. It makes perfect sense looking back on it now, but most of my college training was taking me in a very different direction — underwater archaeology.Even as I was diving on sunken gold dredges in Colorado or translating Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs, I knew something was missing. I loved the pure research aspect of archaeology, but I wanted to do something that made a difference in people’s lives in the here and now. At first, my path led me to customer support. Helping people resolve issues. Growing their confidence. Building trust.But it still felt too reactive. I wanted to be the person who saw the problems before they ever became problems. I wanted to take my experience with experimenting and testing hypotheses and apply it to the products we were working on. I will always be grateful for my manager at Buffer who saw this spark in me before I even saw it in myself.Six years after my first user interview, I still find it endlessly fascinating. It speaks to me in a way that nothing has before, in part because people’s lives are always changing, and we are always trying to build new products that solve new problems. I consider every user I speak with to be part of my team, and I enjoy working with them as much as PMs, engineers, designers, and senior leadership.If you can’t tell, I love talking about research! Please reach out if I can help with anything or if you have questions about the field. I’m also a voracious reader who’s always happy to provide a book suggestion or two (if you haven’t read Circe yet, consider that my first recommendation!).