User Experience Researcher II

Job title            :            User Experience Researcher II - UX Research

Client                :           Heavy Machine Manufacturing Company

Duration           :            17 months contract role

Location           :            Milan IL 61264.

Description:

• Major Purpose Performs end-user facing research to gain insights that will impact an intentional user experience with solutions and communicates insights for use in the design process. Stays abreast of new methods, technology, and trends that impact user experience research and design practices. 
• Ensures the end-user voice is represented throughout the product development process and that the user experience is consistent with the user experience strategy. 
• This level performs research, evaluations, and validations of moderate complexity, covering either a single user class with several personas or multiple user classes with a limited set of personas per user class. Insights and recommendations influence the design of solutions that span multiple product lines in a single platform, involving moderately complex but serial user interactions.

Major Duties:

• Uses appropriate research methodology, tools, and protocols to conduct user-centered research.
• Performs subjective and objective research both qualitatively and quantitatively, to gather deep end-user understanding.
• Leverages appropriate personas and ensures testing covers representative user populations and personas.
• Performs usability/heuristic evaluations and validations across the product or solution life-cycle.
• Communicates research insights resulting in recommendations and priorities for user-centric design.
• Defines the most usable workflows that align with the explicit design philosophy for products and/or solutions.
• Skills, Abilities, Knowledge of various competitive and market research methodologies and methods for organizing and accessing information.
• Understand how to represent user populations using meaningful personas.

Education:

• Degree in an Engineering/Technology discipline or equivalent experience. - University Degree (4 years or equivalent)
• Degree in an Information Technology discipline or equivalent experience. - University Degree (4 years or equivalent) Degree in a Social Sciences discipline or equivalent experience. - University Degree (4 years or equivalent)
• Miscellaneous degree or equivalent experience. - University Degree (4 years or equivalent)

Work Experience:

• Work experience in a team environment. (1 - 3 years)
• Experience using research software tools.  (1 - 3 years)

What the role is responsible for:

• Employee will be working in both an office and at dealerships, taking oversight from User Experience Researcher and Product Managers, with the goal of deeply understanding current state digital products and processes, understanding pain points and opportunities for improvement, piloting new tools and processes with employees and Dealership employees, to best understand usability and impact of the new products. We want to be able to turn pain points into solutions—and be able to monetize the value of solving these problems for both the Dealer/customer.

Day in the life:

• Day in the life: Product management org, developing and delivering order management digital product, all dealerships will use to manage their parts order fulfillment processes. 
• Internal teams manage the Dealer needs via emails, chats, phone calls and also engage with the digital product.  All global dealers will utilize this digital product. 
• They will pair with Product Managers (who understand customer needs – and then feed those needs to IT), US Researcher lead (who is guiding the work and priorities of the UX researcher) 
• Will be a trio with these two to understand processes in place today for submitting a return. 
• What are the pain points for the entire returns process – understand process and product and bring together and understand pain points. 
• Work with US Researcher lead to feed into ecosystem to what will come in the future. 
• This position looks for both the current and what’s coming and what needs to be better with data, facts and knowledge. Ideally, we want to be able to deeply understand the pain points in a way that we can monetize the value associated with fixing the pain points.

Musts:

• Bachelor's Degree in Industrial Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering or User Experience Research, Software Engineering. Comfortable and embraces digital technology, Software digital products, and an agile mindset/methodology.
• Sets the candidate apart: comfortable working with dealers, manage virtual sessions effectively, observing and understanding their pain points, collaborating across multiple functions.