User Experience Researcher

JOB DESCRIPTION

About you -- you thrive conducting research on low-fidelity designs as well as products that have already launched to identify improvement opportunities. You are comfortable working across disciplines to understand the stakeholder's intent, nudge teams to think more holistically about their end users, and capture data to influence design and product decisions.

You can juggle multiple projects in different phases at once and have a natural curiosity to seek answers for current projects while also collecting data from users for longer term opportunities. You enjoy working in cross disciplinary teams and appreciate the opportunity to share your expertise to people who are unfamiliar with the value UXR can provide to teams.

While we are primarily focused on usability testing, we are open to leveraging early and exploratory research as well. You'll work with a UX leader who understands how to leverage your research results and who will help you foster buy in to acting on your results. If you join our team, you'll partner with product owners and engineers to make sure we understand user (customer and employee) needs as we design digital solutions.

Tasks and Responsibilities

• Provide research and support to the customer-facing designs including usability testing, interviews, website and mobile app analytics and other research methods.
• Act as researcher Subject Matter Expert (SME) to inform the team's user centered design decisions for high visibility on-going projects
• Create engaging reports of research results by using and updating our research templates.
• Plan research activities along an agile process to stay ahead of development work, so that engineering and development decisions are informed by the user.
• Summarize research results so that the acitons needed to resolve the issues or take advantage of the revealed opportunities are clear and actionable.
• Understand technical tradeoffs while maintaining a 'bias' toward the user so that iterative improvements can be made over time.
• Collaborate with designers, developers, analysts, product managers and tech leads to implement solutions.
• Synthesize data across different research activities to identify trends and patterns that can further reduce user painpoints and optimize our work processes (e.g, reduce finding the same type of usability problem repeatedly).
• Participate in quarterly planning activies by contributing research results and patterns.
• Remain current on user interface trends and programming techniques and suggest new tools and methods as necessary.
• May assist with user acceptance testing
• Work cross-organizationally with multiple teams and individuals
• Share expertise with other team members to grow their understanding of the importance of end users.

Minimum Qualifications

• High School or GED
• Deep experience with user research tools like
• Experience conducting research and sharing results in a compelling manner to ensure issues are resolved and peers understand the results.
• Experience collaborating with multi-disciplinary teams to research - design - develop - annd test new functionality or iterative improvements.
• Knowledge of qualitative and quantitative research methods.
• History of working with cross functional teams using Agile/Scrum methodologies and an understanding of how to insert research results through out the product life cycle.
• Experience with communicating and working with business and technology stakeholders to help them understand end users needs and expectations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Previous experience with the Electric and Gas Utility Industry
• Degree in human comuter interaction or similar field from an accredited university OR relevant business technical experience
• Proficient understanding of accessibility requirements, web development, mobile applications