Description
User Researcher
Whitehall Resources are currently looking for a User Researcher
Key Requirements:
- Generate new and useful user insights and translate them into features and actions that will allow service/product managers to iteratively improve their service for users.
- Plan, design and conduct in-house research to test new service ideas and concept development (including user requirements gathering, early stage concept and prototype testing, guerrilla research and usability testing sessions, and other approaches to ensure the user need is fully understood in the service design).
- Lead the formal usability testing process for a digital service - from developing user recruitment briefs through to test moderation, analysis and report writing.
- Work with Service/Product Managers to devise appropriate research strategies to generate focused insights and to convert concepts into high quality stimulus material.
- Work closely with designers, business analysts and software developers to turn user data into actionable user stories that influence product/service direction and prototype development.
- Design, script and analyse ad-hoc quantitative surveys.
- Manage ad-hoc qualitative/quantitative research projects such as proposition development, visual identity and customer experience mapping.
- Present findings, recommendations and customer insights to senior decision makers.
- Manage day-to-day operations with a range of usability and market research agencies with accountability for schedules, value for money and deliverables.
- Have excellent interpersonal skills and the ability to quickly develop strong working relationships in high pressure environments.
- Be involved in the wider user research community identifying good practices we can adopt and sharing our experiences.
- Share knowledge of tools and techniques with technical and non-technical team members in the wider digital team, acting as mentor to other junior user researcher(s).
Key Experience:
- Proven experience of using a variety of usability testing methodologies to reveal actionable customer insights and gather user needs for web based services.
- Proven experience of creating research strategies/approaches.
- Proven experience of managing, executing and analysing usability test sessions, and facilitating workshops.
- Excellent analytical and problem solving skills, and the ability to quickly develop recommendations based on quantitative and qualitative evidence.
- Confident in explaining user needs to senior civil servants and acting as a persuasive advocate for those needs both within the team and the department at large.
- Extensive knowledge of human factors, ethnography, and the user-centered design process for product and service design in an iterative development environment.
- Demonstrable knowledge, experience in and passion for user centered design practices.
- Proven experience of audience modelling and developing design personas.
- Experience across web content, tools and transactional services, especially those with complex user journeys (involving development of a logical sequence of steps to complete transactions).
- Comfortable working with data, from gathering and analysis through to design and presentation.
- Comfortable in the capacity of mentor for other user researcher(s).
Desirable Skills:
- Experience of working in an agile development environment with designers, business analysts and developers to create new digital products and services.
- Experience of identifying user needs of users with accessibility requirements.
- Collaborating and Partnering.
- Seeing the Bigger Picture.
- Delivering at Pace.