UX Researcher

Overview

Help us build the future of SmartNews through research. Add your voice to a collaborative design team and discover the human centered insights that will shape our application and form the ongoing and future user experiences of SmartNews.

At SmartNews, research informs all phases of our product development including understanding peoples known (and unknown) needs early before we are even planning to build, ensuring the products we are build deliver and improve on real people needs, and then measuring and refining the impact of our products on the people weve designed them for.

The UX team plays a key role in understanding and disseminating insights about the needs, attitudes, emotions, and behaviors of the people we design products for. We gain insights through exploring the needs, behaviors, and emotions of our audiences and employ these understandings to guide our product strategies.

We are seeking an impassioned, self-directed, experienced researcher who will help to elevate research within the company through insightful, rigorous, and creative research. For us, the right researcher will be an excellent communicator with deep roots in product design and an unyielding curiosity about people and why they do what they do. You are comfortable in a fast moving organization, energized about working in a startup at the forefront of news media, interested in other languages and cultures, hyper-collaborative, and excited to influence the direction of the news. We are an equal opportunity employer and passionate about building a diverse workforce. Women, people of color, and underrepresented minorities are encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities

* Work closely with product teams and key stakeholders to identify research questions

* Be the internal thought leader in domain of user research and advocate for research methodologies

* Design and execute research studies that focus on both user behavior and user attitudes, employing the right methodology for the right insights

* Develop and effectively communicate informed insights to guide and shape the Product teams direction and how Product teams execute their strategies

* Work cross-functionally with design, product management, data science, engineering, and marketing

* Communicate insights in creative and compelling ways

* Mentor other team members

* Scale research best practices and policies company wide

* Develop scalable and effective means to communicate (synchronous and asynchronous) learnings, best practices, and insights company wide

Requirements

Minimum Requirements

* 3+ years experience in applied product research

* 3+ years experience working directly with product teams in end-to-end development

* 3+ years experience developing and guiding users through various research design methodologies including but not limited to usability studies, contextual inquiry, and surveys

* Experience with user research supporting accessibility

Nice to Have

* Master's degree or PhD in Psychology, User Experience, Human-Computer Interaction, Anthropology, Social sciences or related fields,

* A deep interest in news media

* A strong drive to develop excellence in UX research, push product team;s thinking and goals, , and empower the organization to better understand our users and make better decisions for them

* Experience with remote testing tools and unmoderated testing

* Experience selecting, leading and managing research vendors

* Track record of collaborating across disciplines (design, engineering) to drive change and ship insights as product experiences

* Read, write and speak Japanese