I am here… Ask for help? Life as a DevEx Researcher

Mar 28, 2025

There is a lot of research from both academia and industry, describing how UX professionals can collaborate better with developers. I know, because I also published papers on this topic. These papers describe the challenges of having to work with developers who are typically focused on rapid launches, sometimes delivering experiences that come at a cost to the target user. But what happens, when the target user is the developer? How does one learn to see developers as users? How does one learn to navigate the challenges of working in a domain that is so technical, where the users speak languages that are so ‘foreign’. In this 25 minute talk, I will speak about my experience as a Developer experience - UX researcher.

This will be a talk worth listening to for:

  • Those interested in finding out more about the applicability of UX research in other domains
  • Those wanting to uncover what it takes to pursue a career within UX and DevEx research

 

Attendees will come away with insights on:

  • Developer experience research and why this is a thing
  • Why being comfortable with not knowing everything is a great skill for researchers to have
  • How AI is driving change within this field

Speaker

Adeola Wale-Kolade, PhD

Adeola Wale-Kolade, PhD

UX Researcher, Google

Adeola Wale-Kolade is a UX researcher whose path to becoming a UX researcher was due to a series of fortunate events. Growing up, she had always had the desire to understand how things work and assumed this meant she was supposed to go into the medical field. However, she ended up as a banker where she got to experience first hand the challenges of working with tools that had not been designed with the user in mind. She decided to explore this idea of human centered design and moved to the UK for postgraduate studies. There as part of her program, she got to work with the National Health Services and help test and define a framework to be used in evaluating the usability of clinical decision support systems. She decided to pursue this topic of usability further and enrolled in a PhD program where she explored the integration of UX into Agile development and how this could be optimised from a collaborative and process perspective. Currently, she works as a UX researcher at Google where she spends her days thinking about how to improve the experience of developers who are build and maintaining applications on the Google Cloud platform.