The area that first helped me find a passion for design, and used my innate skills. My skills and foundation in UX research positively influence all areas of my design process.
After studying a Masters of UX Design, the first 3 years of my career focussed on UX research. Over these years I've led research projects, planned and ran studies (qual and quant, moderated and unmoderated), synthesised findings for designers and stakeholders, and built research practices into teams that didn't have them yet.
While enjoyed developing my skills to be an end-to-end product designer, my strength in research hasn't disappeared, it's enhanced my ability as a UI designer. I still reach for it instinctively, and it always probes me to think "is this actually the solution to the right problem?" before "what should this look like?".
Research is heaviest at the start of a project, understanding the problem, the users, the context, and again at the end, when designs need to be validated with real people. Especially when I worked for an agency, clients were quick to want to cut research hours as they were perceived as excessive expense (untrue!). The influence of AI has helped to redistribute and reduce time, but not the quality of results. We've got time back from prototyping phase, and it's proven to be a helpful assistance to synthesising.
I'll always put my hand up to say in person, 1:1 research sessions get the most impactful results, but when that's not always available, there are so many quantitative and desk research options now that means we don't have to skip research altogether.