Job Description

The Washington Post is seeking a UX Research Strategist to join its Product Design team. This team of UX, UI and visual designers leads design strategy and visual approaches for The Post's suite of digital products, including washingtonpost.com, our native iOS and Android apps and internal tools.

As a Principle UX Research Strategist on the Product Design team, you will focus on planning and conducting research to uncover insights that allow us to better understand our users and identify opportunities to strategically deliver products that meet their needs. You will conduct primary research to understand behaviors, motivations and pain points of our users, using a variety of research methods. You will create shared understanding and empathy about users needs for our product designers, product managers, engineers and stakeholders. Your research will help us define the strategy, improve the usability, usefulness, desirability and impact of our products. You will define qualitative and quantitative research methods, a research learning agenda, and identify strategic objectives for our team to explore through design frameworks that are supported by research insights. You will evaluate qualitative and quantitative research to distill valuable actionable insights from data. A passion for driving strategy through empathy and aligning user needs with business goals is a must.

You'll be part of a team of more than a dozen designers - guiding and advising team members on research strategies and best practices. You'll collaborate with designers, product managers and internal stakeholders across multiple teams to identify, and conduct research initiatives so we can better understand and focus on our users.

What you will do:

• Understand our users
• Define research strategy to routinely uncover insights and opportunities based on interactions with our users across our product ecosystem
• Recommend and lead the most appropriate methodologies for generating user insights, including participatory design, in-person and remote interviews, ethnographies, user-initiated feedback tools, diary studies, card-sorting, concept testing, and usability studies.
• Facilitate and observe studies in the field (in-home studies, diary studies, customer care data, user reviews) to gain first-hand knowledge of user behaviors
• Collaborate with analytics, consumer research and product/engineering to provide a holistic view of our users, readers and customers
• Help the team to standardize its approach to conduct empathy studies, benchmark analysis, and usability testing
• Utilize insights from user research to drive requirements gathering, customer personas, customer stories and use cases
• Collaborate with design team members to review and provide feedback on research project plans and research deliverables
• Build upon and evolve our persona research to further inform our product vision and strategy

Influence our products

• Play a leadership role in driving a user-centered design approach for Product team, working closely with designers, product managers, developers, marketers and editorial staff
• Inspire change through empathy through the delivery of exciting written, oral, and visual presentations about findings
• Communicate research and analysis clearly and effectively across various organizations. Create shared empathy to support, explain, and coach colleagues from sophisticated design experts to non-designers on the value of human centered design
• Leverage user data to inform our product strategy and design solutions
• Design and facilitate cross-functional workshops with internal and external partners around solving a clearly defined problem based on your research insights
• Encourage thinking that can shift our product direction and improve our business decisions based on research insights and user needs
• Evangelize research results and influence leadership with a persuasive, insight-driven stance on complex user experience and business issues

Strategically Elevate Our Work

• Create and execute a research learning agenda to identify customer insights across our product portfolio to identify opportunities aligned with business initiatives
• Partner with UX/UI Designers, Product Managers, and Engineers to deliver solutions that truly resonate
• Take opportunities to institute new points-of-views on trends and insights, and develop new processes that evolve our teams expanding research capabilities
• Identify, plan, and budget for research tools that will continue to enhance our research framework to inform our design work and processes
• Engage in functions throughout our products lifecycle; from discovery, to early concept validation, through usability studies on live products. You'll craft research methodology recommendations, then facilitate and guide synthesis to create actionable insights for designers and product managers to act upon
• Document strategies and create a library of user research templates and guides for the Product design team to use
• Leverage analytics tools and techniques to measure success, present opportunities, and support decision-making and prioritization

This ideal candidate for this role:

• Wants to be hands-on with design and design strategy
• Is passionate about leveraging research insights to drive design ideation and strategy
• Constantly looks for ways to improve the way our products look AND work
• Loves to collaborate closely with colleagues in research, product management and engineering
• Is organized, driven and excited about using audience insights to define and design news products of the future
• Can clearly and passionately articulate the thinking behind a design strategy
• Is energized by problem-solving and loves to fully define and ideate strategic solutions for difficult problems
• Is a passionate expert in human-centered design
• Is passionate about identifying and solving problems that will have a positive impact for our users and our business
• Can seamlessly balance focus on small tactical details and big picture strategy
• Takes pride in owning their work and driving results on key business initiatives
• Loves to ideate with a major focus on end-to-end user experience, and understanding user-driven needs

You have:

• A portfolio that shows a strong body of work including outstanding research design, strategy and impact
• 7+ years of UX Research & Strategy experience
• Extensive experience defining and conducting UX Research & Strategy, preferably for subscriptions or e-commerce products
• An established track record of producing business results through research driven product strategy
• Deep knowledge of the UX process and research techniques including competitive analysis, user interviews, usability testing, persona creation and journey mapping
• A collaborative spirit and a proven ability to work well with others, building strong partnerships across teams
• Expertise on best practices for research design methodologies
• Comfort with design and prototyping software like Sketch & invision
• Expertise in organizing collaborative workshops to ideate against actionable user insights
• Proven ability to create shared empathy around user needs
• Strong presentation and writing skills
• Experience with or strong interest in digital media and news

The Post strives to provide its readers with high-quality, trustworthy news and information while constantly innovating. That mission is best served by a diverse, multi-generational workforce with varied life experiences and perspectives. All cultures and backgrounds are welcomed.

The innovation doesn't end in the Newsroom - dozens of teams power The Washington Post. We are now hiring the next innovator - how will you Impact Tomorrow?

#washpostlife