Senior User Researcher

Venesky-Brown's client, a public sector organisation in Edinburgh/Glasgow, is currently looking to recruit a Senior User Researcher for an initial 4 month contract with potential to extend on a rate of £471.04/day (Inside IR35). This role will be hybrid working.

Responsibilities:

- Plan and conduct user research, utilising appropriate strategies to test new ideas and concept development (including discovery, user requirements gathering, usability testing, and other qualitative and quantitative approaches to ensure the user's needs are fully understood in the product's design)
- Review and synthesise primary and secondary research material;
- Generate new, useful and focussed insights and translate them into actionable features that allow teams to iteratively improve their product/service for users;
- Support the set up of approaches and tools which enable efficient insight documentation for ease of reference in wider design and development work;
- Work closely with other designers and product managers to devise appropriate research strategies to generate focused insights;
- Act as a champion for user-centred design and design research across wider directorates

Essential Skills:

- Experience in applying appropriate user-centred research methods and participant recruitment strategies to suit different project contexts
- Collaboration with other design disciplines, especially service design and UX design
- Planning and running interviews and workshops with users and stakeholders, including remote sessions
- Experience of working both independently and as part of a team, whilst balancing a range of competing priorities
- Experience of leading team meetings, webinars, events and/or conferences online
- Track record of working within project management environments, planning and organising a variety of tasks, including involvement in multiple projects and programmes of work
- Experience communicating complex, confidential and often sensitive information with a range of staff across the organisation and with external stakeholders (both verbally and in writing)
- Ability to work with minimal supervision; to plan and prioritise own workloads, and that of your team; and to meet deadlines
- Flexible approach to learning and problem solving
- Commitment to own personal and professional development, and that of your team
- Design research tools eg contextual inquiry, journey mapping, affinity mapping, card sorting, interviews, surveys, and workshops
- Knowledge of co-creation strategies to engage, work with, and empower people to generate ideas and to collaboratively create concepts
- Research participant recruitment
- An understanding of inclusion and accessibility
- Able to source and synthesise relevant secondary research sources
- Ability to manage internal and external stakeholders across different levels of seniority
- Ability to respond to confidential and sensitive situations with confidence and discretion, utilising tact, diplomacy, and persuasion skills when necessary
- Ability to collate and produce reports and statistical information
- Line management skills and experience including coaching and/or mentoring of team members
- Proven expertise in using Microsoft 365, in particular Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and SharePoint
- Ability to meet the travel requirements of the post
- Values driven approach to practice, aligned with core values

Desirable Skills:

- Honours Degree level qualification with related indepth experience or
- SCQF Level 10 equivalence obtained via Professional Development Awards; Graduate or Professional Apprenticeships; and SVQs
- Experience of agile software development processes and multi-disciplinary teams
- Experience of delivering presentations to large audiences on a local and/or national basis to enhance engagement and collaboration
- Experience of working within a Health, Social Care or educational environment
- Experience of working flexibly in complex/sensitive environments where the parameters of the job are not necessarily clearly defined
- Expertise in accessing, analysing and presenting a wide range of complex information to a range of audiences
- Expertise in remote whiteboarding/collaboration tools
- Ability to communicate complex material to technical and product management colleagues
- Usability testing
- Design sprint methodology
- Knowledge of tools for software analytics
- Knowledge of research insight management tools
- Sound understanding of the application of GDPR to the storage and use of personal information and data privacy
- Knowledge and understanding of the wider combined health and social care system (including the third and independent sector) along with a sound grasp of the Scottish policy context/sector

If you would like to hear more about this opportunity please get in touch.