Senior User researcher

Description

• Project leading and direction - You will lead and direct projects with a focus on ensuring all services are inclusive, accessible and planet-friendly. You'll lead multidisciplinary teams through complex or high value projects. You'll also act as director on projects, pointing teams and clients in the right direction to deliver on scope and on budget.
• Team support and management - You'll help to support the user research team, for example by mentoring colleagues and contributing to recruitment activities. You may line manage more junior team members, including conducting and overseeing appraisals, making recommendations in relation to progression and communicating resulting decisions to the people you manage.
• Defining and refining practice - You'll help to define the way our disciplines work together. Working with Research Ops, Service Design, Training and the other disciplines, you'll further articulate our methods. This includes developing and implementing accessible, inclusive and planet-friendly user research practices.

• Research - You lead development of research frameworks, and completion of Data Protection Impact Assessments, planning research to uncover the key factors affecting a service and its use (contextual, operational, cultural, technological, human, strategic, business model ) You define research approaches, questions and activities appropriate to the project context, constraints and outcomes. You can direct teams to conduct research effectively and efficiently, and you use the most suitable methods to lead in the analysis of research to identify and summarise actionable insights.
• Analysis and synthesis - You can analyse and synthesise findings from user research to produce robust, evidence-based user stories, identifying the difference between user needs and the desires of the user. You lead co-analysis and co-synthesis sessions and engage sceptical stakeholders through these, clearly explaining the processes to enable them to engage fully and contribute. You can advise other researchers on choice and application of techniques for analysis and synthesis. You can confidently and humbly critique others' findings to ensure best practice.
• User-centred focus - You oversee others to ensure we always conduct ethical research. You ensure user needs are kept front and centre at all stages of a project. You can advise others about conducting user research in challenging situations to ensure participants are supported and able to describe their experiences, so that we fully understand their needs. You can choose and lead appropriate approaches to mapping feasible, viable and desirable user-centred services and experiences. You are able to balance multiple forms of research and stakeholder participation. You take responsibility for ensuring that outcomes are actionable in the face of business and contextual constraints, and aligned to client strategies.
• Agile practices: You are confident in applying agile methods in practice. You lead in the identification and development of appropriate research activities across the different agile phases of a project. You lead the production of evidence for GDS assessments, having experience of assessments in at least one of the Discovery, Alpha and Beta stages. You have experience of leading multi-disciplinary agile teams, understand the roles and responsibilities of the different team members, and can communicate user research insights in ways that enable others to prioritise and complete activities specific to their role. You lead teams and ensure adherence to the guidelines of the Government Service Manual for Research.