User Researcher

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User researcher

We make sure that the money is available to fund the UK's public services, and help families and individuals with targeted financial support.

Over the next few years this will completely transform how we deal with around 40 million individuals and 5 million businesses.

We are building a team of outstanding people who will create and run these new and improved digital services. We will be using modern technology and agile development methods, and release as much of our work as possible as open source software.

As a User Researcher you will:

· 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 and across government, acting as mentor to other junior user researcher(s).

Skills and 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

Please submit CV's at the first instance.