Senior User Researcher

Senior User Researchers are experienced practitioners in either quantitative or qualitative research who collaborate with and lead others to understand challenges people and society face. They lead the research within a team to inform the design and deliver public services. They do this by managing and conducting user research with real people, ensuring what their team is learning in research informs the end-to-end design of a chosen service.

Key Responsibilities

• Responsible to the Lead User Researcher for informing the design and delivery of public services:
• Scope the focus of research, so everyone involved has a shared understanding of what success looks like
• Acts as the research subject matter expert on a product team, facilitating the design process and communicating research decisions to the team and stakeholders
• Plan research that informs the design of public services that are helpful, usable and successful
• Contributes to communities of practice, discussing and sharing suggestions, approaches and ideas - including proactively seeking feedback on own work
• Assure the quality of decisions across multiple teams
• Share research freely and often with project team and research community
• Line manage other user researchers

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

Practice

• Analyse and interpret research findings so that teams can confidently confirm or challenge their understandings of problems and ideas
• Make decisions based on research findings and ; model this behaviour to the rest of your team
• Experienced in user centred, lean and agile research methodologies including:
• Usability testing
• Contextual enquiry
• Rapid research
• Survey development
• Measurable and evaluative research
• Understands and applies research ethics and GDPR practices
• Provide clear and informative communications with research participants, including sharing GDPR policies

Contributing to teams

• Involve whole project teams in user research to build their understanding and empathy for people using and running public services
• Assure the quality of decisions within their project team with support from research community
• Introduce good habits for sharing and improving design work into teams
• Understanding the wider scope of project work and how design decisions will ultimately affect members of the public

Community

• Support the hiring and onboarding of designers and researchers
• Help define Made Tech design principles through delivering good public services
• Contribute to a design studio culture at Made Tech and client offices
• Represent user-centred design publicly and internally
• Give feedback often
• Understand that a balance of positive and constructive feedback is the most effective way to work

Job Benefits

Support in applying

We believe we can use tech to make public services better. We also believe this can happen best when our own team represents the society that actually uses the services we work on. We’re collectively continuing to grow a culture that is happy, healthy, safe and inspiring for people of all backgrounds and experiences, so we encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply for roles with us.

When you apply, we’ll put you in touch with a member of our talent team who can help with any needs or adjustments we may need to make to help with your application. We’ve put together this blog as a resource to share more about reasonable adjustments and some examples of what this could include. We also welcome any feedback on how we can improve the experience for future candidates.

Life at Made Tech

We’re committed to building a happy, inclusive and diverse workforce. You can get a sense of what it’s like working here from our blog, where we talk about mental health, communities of practice and neurodiversity as well as our client work and best practice.

Like many organisations, we use Slack to chat to each other. The Slack groups that have formed give an idea of the diversity within Made Tech. If you’d like to speak to someone from one of these groups about their experience as an employee, please let one of the Made Tech Talent Team know.

The groups are:

• antiracist-activists
• disability
• lgbtqiaplus-allies-and-activists
• neurodiversity
• parents-carers
• Womxn-in-tech

Benefits

We are always listening to our growing teams and evolving the benefits available to our people. As we scale, as do our benefits and we are scaling quickly. We've recently introduced a flexible benefit platform which includes a Smart Tech scheme, Cycle to work scheme, and an individual benefits allowance which you can invest in a Health care cash plan or Pension plan. We’re also big on connection and have an optional social and wellbeing calendar of events for all employees to join should they choose to.

Here are some of our most popular benefits listed below:

• 30 days Holiday - we offer 30 days of paid annual leave
• Flexible Working Hours - we are flexible with what hours you work
• Flexible Parental Leave - we offer flexible parental leave options
• Remote Working - we offer part time remote working for all our staff
• Paid counselling - we offer paid counselling as well as financial and legal advice