Our client, one of the largest financial industry clients in Canada, has an immediate need for a Design Researcher. This is a contract position for one (1) year located in Toronto, ON (Temporary Remote).
What are the 8 main responsibilities of the role?
- Proactively identifying opportunities for research to inform product strategy and design decisions
- Designing and/or facilitating workshops for gathering information about new work or areas of focus, helping the team to distinguish what we think we know from the questions we haven’t answered
- Building new cross-functional advocates for the voice and needs of our users
- Crafting research plans
- Conducting generative and evaluative research
- Managing multiple research activities by effectively prioritizing and communicating those priorities and their implications with peers and partners
- Guiding design peers in crafting their own evaluative research plans and supporting them in conducting their own research activities
- Contributing to the Design Research practice in Digital Design
What capabilities makes the designer you’re replacing (or current designers on your team) successful?
- Comfort in leading both generative and evaluative research independently and with limited guidance
- A desire to speak for our end users (usually clients, but sometimes front-line staff) while recognizing the value of the (sometimes competing) interests of our business partners
- An ability to identify opportunities for research activities before anyone asks for it
- An ability to tease a story out of the data we collect and to share that story in meaningful ways with our peers and partners
- An ability to translate that story to fit the interests, needs or goals of the audiences with which (and contexts in which) we share it: e.g., designers in a huddle, the entire team in a sprint review, senior management in a formal presentation
- The patience to guide other team members in developing their own research skills so that they can take on more research activities over time without so much guidance or support
What does the future state of success look like for the new designer?
- This person will have become a trusted source of guidance on how we might recognize the questions we need to ask in order to move forward with confidence and on how we might answer them
- She/he/they will have won the respect of their peers and partners
- We will all see more designers leading their own research activities with only guidance from this person and, as a result, this person will have more time to focus on broader research initiatives
What are the must have 6 skills?
- Deep experience with evaluative testing methods and tools, particularly in a remote environment
- Solid experience with generative research methods, including in-depth interviews, diary studies and ethnography, particularly in a remote environment
- Solid experience designing and facilitating workshops for collaborative definition of problems to solve and of the outcomes we hope those solutions will produce
- A deep toolchest of research methods are at your finger tips: card sorting, tree jacking, heat mapping, A/B testing, and so on.
- Solid experience bringing new team members on board to an existing knowledge base about our customers
- Solid experience leading cross-functional co-synthesis sessions or building on synthesis to generate HMW
What are the nice to have skills (3-4 max)?
- Solid experience with our current tool set: UserTesting, Optimal Workshop, Mural
- Experience working in highly-regulated industries (like financial institutions)
- Figma
What skills would you like to build within your team?
- We’d like our team members to have more comfort with leading workshops with our peers and partners.
- We’d also like our design practitioners to have more comfort with basic research tools and methods, our goal being for them to need less support or direction from our designated design researchers.
What program/technology/software knowledge is essential for this role? Describe in what capacity the selected candidate will be using it?
Figma will be used the majority of the time, we also use Mural and Keynote.
Soft Skills:
Strong communication and presentation skills, ability to collaborate with other designers and cross-functional team members, ability to manage stakeholders and build relationships.
Additional Information
- Client requires proof of Covid-19 vaccination to access job site. Providing proof of vaccination is a condition of employment with Ian Martin” for this opportunity.
- The resource can work from home to start but will be required to work onsite in Edmonds at least 2 days per week once covid worksite restrictions lifted
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