Linguistics → UXR | Career Pivot Prep & ShopBack UXR Intern Interview

It All Started with One Afternoon

One afternoon in August, my sister and I met up with a senior friend I deeply admire, Selena. She was student council president when I was a freshman; we both ended up in the NCKU Chinese Literature graduate program, where she was my direct senior. She crossed from Chinese Literature into the gaming industry, then tech, and now works as a PM at ShopBack. Incredibly accomplished.

We’d mainly come to talk through my sister’s career, but I ended up getting pulled in too. I asked: if I didn’t want to stay in academia, what directions might be worth exploring? Selena knew I’d been teaching myself Figma and suggested looking at the UI/UX space.

That night I looked up what UI/UX actually meant (I’d heard the phrase, never really understood it), and the more I read, the more interested I got. I started looking at job listings. And ShopBack happened to have a UX Researcher internship open — exactly the “not full-time, but want to learn something new” situation I was in. I immediately started reworking my resume.

UX and Why It Clicked

UX stands for User Experience. The Design of Everyday Things, which I’d been reading at the time, is one of the foundational books in this field (I wrote about it here and here). Reading it made me realize: when something feels clunky to use, that’s a product problem — not a user problem. Finding the entry point shouldn’t require effort. Scrolling through a help page means the product needs work.

UX is fundamentally about making experiences better by understanding users — their needs, their mental models, their behavior. It’s deeply psychological and cognitive science. And the field divides into several roles: Designer, Researcher, etc.

What actually sold me on Research specifically: I’d once participated in a user study as a subject, and afterward I read some articles about how the research was conducted. It struck me — user research is incredibly linguistics-adjacent. Interviewers minimize implicature to avoid leading the participant. They attend carefully to emotional tone and word choice. They know how to probe — to find what someone really means beneath what they say. These are all linguistic research skills.

I was interested in design too, but I realized I liked doing research more. Decision made.

Pre-Pivot Preparation

Making the leap from linguistics academia to a tech UXR role was a big shift. I had under a month between deciding to apply and actually applying — here’s what helped most.

Hahow Course: Product Design in Practice — Building UI/UX with Figma

This was my entry point into product development and UX. I started just to learn Figma (it’s still what I use for post covers!), but the course content was genuinely fascinating and useful.

Instructor Simon is incredibly thorough — five stars without question. But beyond the technical Figma content, Unit 1 laid out the full product development process in a way that was directly useful for preparing for UXR interviews. There’s also a dedicated Slack community with tons of shared resources and job-related discussions.

UXRs don’t usually touch design directly, but this course gave me the foundational industry context, and getting comfortable with Figma early meant I could hit the ground running during the internship.

UX Books

I didn’t have time to read much in the available window, but two books stood out.

The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman): No techniques, just foundational understanding of the field. Essential.

WEB 設計職人必修：UX Design 初學者學習手冊: More practical — covers how to build personas, what to watch for in user research, how to map customer journeys. Very useful for building a portfolio quickly.

Podcasts

When reading wasn’t possible, I listened to UX podcasts. Mainly 設計遊牧 (Design Nomad) — three great hosts, lots of useful content. Episodes on interviewing hiring managers and what really matters in UX were particularly helpful when preparing for my interview.

Articles

Like everyone recommends: Google “UXR Taiwan,” read the first three pages of results, then repeat with new keywords until you start seeing the same articles recycled. This quickly builds a picture of the current UX landscape in Taiwan, what matters in interviews, the nuances between different roles, how to build a portfolio.

Interview Prep

When I saw the ShopBack UXR listing, I reworked my resume fast. (I keep mine updated in Notion — highly recommend this habit. See: Building a Personal CV with Notion Templates.)

I had a fairly mixed work history, so I made some choices: stripped out most of the academic-only experience, kept what was research-adjacent, and really emphasized my time as a Project Manager on a podcast at Mirror Media — it was the most relevant thing I had.

Also: just before my interview, ShopBack’s UXR team happened to present at an IxDA event. I went. Hearing how they actually worked and what they were researching made me about 20% less nervous going in.

The ShopBack UXR Intern Interview

A few notes on what the process was like.

ShopBack didn’t require a portfolio in the initial application. When I reached out to HR and asked anyway, they said it wasn’t required but would be appreciated. I prepared one.

First impression: the HR team was impressively efficient — quick, precise responses, clear timelines, plenty of scheduling flexibility.

Round 1

A one-hour interview, fully in English, with the UXR manager.

Most of what she asked, I’d prepared for in my portfolio. Glad I made it. She asked me to pick my favorite case study and walk through it — I had room to actually develop my thinking.

The piece I spent the most time on: explaining what I, as a linguistics researcher, could contribute to UXR. And what my particular life experience and personality could bring to the team. These were questions I’d thought about carefully beforehand, because for anyone making a cross-disciplinary move, the pivot isn’t a weakness — but you have to be able to articulate what you bring to this new field.

Other standard questions:

• Does the JD actually fit you?
• What are your biggest strengths and weaknesses?
• How do you take notes? How do you organize them afterward?
• What research have you done that overlaps with UX?
• What do you understand about UX, and how is it different from other kinds of design or research?
• Where do you see yourself in two years?
• How would you rate this interview experience? (Very UXR energy. 😄)

The whole thing felt more like a conversation than an interrogation. Low pressure, open. Lots of time for my questions at the end too.

Take-Home Assignment

The second round invitation came with an assignment:

• Self-introduction
• A user research plan
• A typing speed test

It didn’t take long (they explicitly said they didn’t want it to), but I had a lot of fun writing it.

Final Round

Final interview: present the self-intro and walk through the research plan I’d designed.

No right answers, but like any research: establish clear objectives and expected outcomes, choose an appropriate method, design a realistic plan within constraints of time and budget. For me, the research design wasn’t the hard part — I know how to write a research question. The challenge was imagining how to do that within a company context, not an academic one. I read a lot of examples of industry research plans to get oriented.

Final round had the manager plus one more UXR, also fully in English for an hour. Almost all the time went to the research plan — you need to know why you made every choice: why this method, what outcome do you expect, what would change if X were different.

I also asked, at the end, how they thought my research plan was. The verdict: too idealistic. Ha.

Then a long wait, then the HR call with an offer.

And that’s how my baby UXR life began. :3

Afterword

I wrote this post to record a genuinely significant moment of mind-shift — deciding to commit to a completely unfamiliar field — and to document how I found my footing and figured out where I had an advantage.

I genuinely love UXR. So glad I took the leap.

Hope this helps anyone thinking about a cross-disciplinary move who doesn’t know where to start. Questions always welcome in the comments!

Thanks for reading :D

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