Senior UX Researcher

Overview

Aquent is helping our client, a multinational tech company, recruit a Senior UX Researcher to join their team. 

As a User Experience Researcher (UXR), you help everyone focus on the user. You create understanding and empathy around user needs, stated and unstated, for your entire product team including designers, product managers, and engineers. You do so by conducting research and exploring the behaviours and motivations of our users through methods like surveys, usability testing, and in-depth interviews.

You are an expert in your field. You use your knowledge of qualitative and/or quantitative research methods to conduct moderately complex research projects with little-to-no oversight. You are able to communicate findings clearly and concisely, and your work has a direct impact on product strategy and decision-making. You are also actively involved in contributing to the field of UX research, collaborating, and finding new ways to improve the user experience. You are a fully-trusted, senior member of a team, and may be seen as a ‘lead’ of a particular area, project, or initiative.

This is a 12-month contract role aimed to start in December 2024. Our client works on a hybrid model where you will be required to work onsite in their London Kings Cross office 3 days per week. The role comes with a gross PAYE rate of £50 per hour, equivalent to £104,000 per annum, pro rata. This includes 33 days of holiday per annum, pro rata, inclusive of bank holidays.

Responsibilities:

• Prioritise research across projects, negotiate and communicate priorities with team members and stakeholders.
• Plan, design, and engage in research that informs the product/service/business mission, direction, and/or strategy, increasing knowledge about users’ needs, pain points, values, opportunities, and motivations.
• Use your own understanding of the users to advocate for the user and build empathy and advocacy among own cross-functional stakeholders throughout the product development lifecycle.
• Increase the relevance, impact and usefulness of the research insights. Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to increase relevance, visibility, uptake of the research, and action on recommendations. Propose and use key data and metrics to evaluate products/services/business.
• Consolidate, synthesise and communicate what is known about the user, product, service, or business to generate insights and create frameworks for driving strategic thinking and vision in a way that elicits empathy for users and creates buy-in and/or new opportunities. Through this, increase the visibility of research and user insights.
• Execute research to inform cross-functional stakeholders about user insights, business opportunities and industry trends. Work with stakeholders to achieve key performance indicators (KPIs), influence long-term product direction, and generate business impact through research expertise, user-centred thinking, strategy, vision and future thinking.

Top 3 Hard Skills:

1. Usability testing
2. Surveys
3. In-depth interviews

Top 3 Soft Skills:

1. Socialising insights with stakeholders
2. Research planning, creating research deliverables
3. Socialising insights with stakeholders

Knowledge & Experience:​

• Proven experience in user research for technology products
• A Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, or a related field, or equivalent experience
• Familiarity with statistical analysis software (e.g., R, SPSS), qualitative data analysis tools (e.g., NVivo), and prototyping tools (e.g., Figma) is beneficial
• Knowledge of principles and methods for defining and measuring UX, and the ability to adapt UX research methods to the appropriate user interface and platform.
• Ability to think holistically about strategic value for users based in understanding their motivations, needs, pain points, and values. This includes knowledge of human capabilities, including principles of human cognition and information processing, emotion and sentiment, decision-making and behaviour, and how these translate into use, user, and usage fundamentals, usability principles and design best practices.
• Ability to prioritize the needs of people in order to conduct ethical user research to drive the design or adaptation of user interfaces, products, services, or platforms, especially if ethical conflicts of interest arise. A focus on planning and conducting research that prioritizes ethics from a user’s perspective.
• Knowledge of how people use and interact with technology in order to influence the design, evaluation, and iterative improvement of interactive hardware and software systems.
• Knowledge of the full research lifecycle from planning, to execution, to communicating insights, to impacting product and business direction or strategy.

We’d love you to apply for this 12-month Senior UX Researcher contract role, so please submit your CV today!

*Due to the high volume of applications we experience, if you have not received a response within 48hrs of your application, please assume that you have not been selected for progression to the next stage of the hiring process.