Lead User Researcher

edX, a Cambridge-based non-profit, is dedicated to increasing access to high-quality online education to everyone, everywhere. It’s a big job - think internationalization, accessibility, and usability - and we’re looking for someone interested in the challenge of understanding our customers to help build great experiences at scale.

The culture at edX is casual and collaborative. UX team members collaborate with larger, cross-functional teams comprised primarily of product and engineering. Our Agile workflow and embedded structure allows us to influence and shape decisions about what to create for learners. We’re looking for someone who can help us define high-quality research practices while bringing other customer-facing parts of the organization together.

Basics:

• Have 10 years professional experience in the software/design/digital world
• Recent experience in a UX-specific setting ~5+ years
• Deep expertise in delivering research in an Agile environment
• Proactively prioritize, manage, and identify opportunities for value-added work through formal and informal channels
• Excellent communication skills (verbal and written) with demonstrated interpersonal capabilities to effectively build and foster collaborative relationships with people at all levels of the organization
• Establishes quality bar on how/why we conduct research through influencing, modeling, and scaling ways of working beyond the local UX team to evangelize and push customer-centric research into the larger organization 
• Act as a connector between the following teams: Data, Marketing Insights, Support, and UX Research
• Drive the creation of a centralized platform for all existing and new research
• Foster partnerships with the greater UX team, Engineering, Product management and other stakeholders to craft customer-centric strategies that balance business and user needs in a practical and effective way
• Apply analytical thinking to drive the business value of research in all work
• Comfortable walking through your thinking and processes to show us how you approach your work and the context that motivates it
• Thrive in ambiguity; lead problem-solving within complex systems with ease
• Demonstrate deep expertise in planning and executing generative research (i.e. ethnography, contextual inquiry, qualitative surveys, literature reviews) and evaluative user research (i.e. usability, tree tests, card sorts)
• Lead teams, direct work, coach, mentor, and train junior teammates

As an edX UXer, you:

• Have expertise in usability heuristics, WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines, and user research
• Establish governance and drive adoption of UX research best practices to ensure consistency across applications and/or processes
• Successfully engage and manage work within multiple initiatives while operating independently or within a team
• Have a hunger for making customer research results digestible, accessible, and applicable across the organization
• Digest existing research and experiment regularly - find and review data, make research plans, run studies, analyze results, and influence the future priorities of the platform
• Understand established interactive technologies and possess an undying thirst to learn about new ones
• Drive large-scale efforts to enhance the overall experience
• Solve problems through systems thinking who can build out research frameworks and assemble tools to enable efficient frequent cycles of user feedback
• Document your thinking using thoughtfully chosen and informed deliverables and artifacts like: sketches, wireframes, site maps/flows, personas, and presentations
• Collaborate with peers in product and engineering
• Use a variety of tools and techniques as appropriate for your team’s needs
• Act as a servant leader, mentor, and subject matter expert to help elevate the quality of work of the overall UX team
• Motivate, inspire, and influence others in the org to engage with design thinking and best UX practices

Check out a video with a Sr. UX Designer on the Experience team here. 

Sorry, employment visa sponsorship is not available. This position is based in our Cambridge, MA office.