UX research in the Middle East: How context drives better product decisions

By mid-morning, Farida would already have spoken to dozens of people. Customers moving through electronics stores, some curious, some skeptical, many unsure why a stranger was asking them about a product they barely understood.

She repeated this routine across seven cities, sitting inside retail branches for hours at a stretch, watching behavior, listening closely, adjusting her approach every time the conversation went somewhere unexpected. There were no labs, no controlled conditions, no neatly scripted interviews. Just people, context, and conversations that unfolded differently every single time.

"The structure was flexible," she says. "It was organic. You just talk to people."

This was not how Farida expected to learn UX research. But it is how she did. And it's the kind of research (grounded, contextual, culturally attuned) that sits at the heart of everything we do at DOT.

‍

Research wasn't the plan

Farida did not plan to become a UX researcher. Her first role was in Customer Success, a chapter defined by constant communication and a level of social energy that didn't come naturally to her. She was good at the work, but she was more interested in understanding people than managing them.. in asking harder questions and sitting with what the answers revealed.

During university, she had taken a Human Computer Interaction course and stayed interested in the intersection of design and technology. When she eventually approached the head of design at her company, she came prepared, bringing her graduation thesis, a paper on artificial intelligence written before the topic had entered mainstream conversation.

After a cognitive assessment, the head of design saw something in her.. a natural curiosity, a tendency to probe rather than accept things at face value and suggested research over design. Not as a consolation, but as a better fit. Farida wasn't immediately convinced. Design was what she'd had in mind. But the person reading her results saw something she hadn't quite named in herself yet.

‍

When business pressure masquerades as research

She didn't ease into the role. From the start, she was handed real work: research tasks that required observation, questioning, synthesis, and the ability to explain what she'd found to people who hadn't been in the room.

There was no onboarding framework. No shared definition of what good research even meant inside the organisation. What she did have was a mentor who believed in learning through exposure, not explanation.

When she formally moved into a research role, the absence of structure became impossible to ignore. Much of her early work involved calling users and asking direct questions about pricing and product features. The conversations were framed as research but were driven more by business pressure than genuine curiosity.

"They'd say, 'I don't even want this feature.' And I'd still have to ask how much they'd pay for it."

It wasn't real research and she knew it. But it was teaching her something.. how to sit with ambiguity, push through difficult conversations, and hear what users were actually saying, not just what the business wanted to confirm.

‍

What the field actually teaches you

Things shifted when her mentor moved to another company and brought her along.

The scope expanded. Farida began conducting field research for a fintech service embedded inside electronics retail stores, traveling across Egypt to speak with customers on the ground. The research was unscripted and deeply situational. Conversations varied by city, by dialect, by the social dynamics of each location. Every stop required a different kind of attention.

There were no shortcuts.

At DOT, we talk a lot about the value of field research and ethnographic methods, getting out of the lab and into the spaces where people actually live, work, and make decisions. What Farida experienced in Egypt was exactly that, earned the hard way. Context stopped being a theoretical concept and became something she experienced firsthand, store by store, hour by hour. Insight didn't come from polished frameworks. It came from proximity, repetition, and a willingness to stay in the discomfort a little longer than felt comfortable.

‍

When speed replaces rigour

Over time, the environment changed around her. Leadership priorities shifted toward speed. Rigour was increasingly treated as optional. Research became something to check off rather than invest in.

Without her mentor as a buffer, Farida found her credibility questioned more openly. As a young woman in a culture that didn't always make space for her perspective, her input carried less weight than it deserved. The decision to leave wasn't dramatic. It was clear.

She applied for a role in Portugal, went through an intensive interview process, and got it.

‍

The limits of easy

The contrast was immediate and not entirely welcome.

In Europe, research came with infrastructure. Recruiting was handled through dedicated tools. Sessions were remote. Processes were documented and widely understood. Nobody questioned whether the work was legitimate.

"It felt too easy," she says.

Having spent years conducting qualitative research in physical spaces.. adapting to context, navigating uncontrolled environments, building trust with people who had no particular reason to give it, Farida found that efficiency had replaced something harder to name. Remote research has real advantages; it's a significant part of how we work at DOT, including through our own platform, UserQ, built specifically to help teams reach and test with real users across the MENA region. But Farida's experience in Portugal reinforced something important: the method has to fit the question. Ease doesn't always lead to insight. Sometimes the friction is the point.

‍

The value of starting fresh every time

Farida later moved to the UAE, first in fintech, then to DOT. The most meaningful shift wasn't geographic, it was structural.

In product organisations, research is continuous and rarely feels complete. There's always another sprint, another question, another version to test. In agency work, projects have defined beginnings and ends. There's clarity about the scope, and there's closure when the work is done. And there's variety.. moving between industries, problem spaces, and clients that ask fundamentally different things of you.

For Farida, that variety is part of what keeps the work honest. No two projects let her rely on the same assumptions. It's the kind of environment DOT is built around: research as a practice that has to flex, that stays close to context, and that earns its recommendations rather than inheriting them.

‍

Language as a research tool

Farida is candid when asked about entering the field. UX research, she often notes, is genuinely niche. There are fewer roles and fewer obvious entry points than in design or product management. That cuts both ways.

"Because it's niche, you aren't competing with 10,000 people. You're competing with five."

In the Middle East specifically, one factor shapes opportunity in ways that don't always show up in job descriptions: language. 

Arabic isn't simply a skill on a résumé. It enables trust, nuance, and access. It changes what users are willing to share, how sessions are moderated, and how findings are understood by the teams who receive them. 

It's one of the reasons DOT delivers UX training and conducts research sessions in both Arabic and English because the quality of the insight depends on the quality of the connection.

‍

Context is the work

Farida's path into research wasn't straight. It was shaped by unexpected turns, a mentor who saw potential before she did, and fieldwork that taught her things no framework could. Each experience, in its own way, pointed her toward the same thing: research that is honest, contextual, and genuinely useful.

She has seen what happens when research is treated as a checkbox, and what happens when it's grounded in real, human experience. The difference shows up in the quality of the decisions that follow.

That's the version of research DOT was built around: insight rooted in the region, delivered by people who understand its cultures, languages, and the very specific ways trust is built here. Whether that's through field research, usability testing, diary studies, experience design, or helping organisations build their own in-house research capability, the commitment is the same. Users are people before they are data points.

The Middle East is one of the most dynamic, diverse, and under researched regions in the world. The opportunity to do meaningful work here, work that actually shapes how products are built and how people experience them, has never been greater. Farida sees that clearly. So do we.

She didn't enter this field because it was easy to access. She stayed because the questions kept getting better. That's the best reason to stay in any discipline and it's exactly the kind of curiosity that drives the work forward.

‍

Interested in how DOT approaches research in the MENA region? Get in touch — we'd love to talk.

‍