The Opportunity:Join athenahealth’s quest to make healthcare work the way it should. Our health is incredibly precious, and people in need of health care are often at their most fragile. Yet the function and experience of healthcare continues to fall far behind the innovative services we receive in other more frivolous parts of our lives.
Over the last decade, athenahealth has grown a mature experience design team. The digital products we build to enable athenahealth services are best-in-class, but we know there is still much room for improvement. We are pushing to make evidence-based experience design a central competency and competitive lever. Core to that mission is the establishment of our Experience Measurement Framework that informs product design & development from conception to in-market iteration. As a part of this framework, the design research team provides qualitative and quantitative tools and guidance to our scrum teams that include product owners, product designers, and engineers.
athenahealth is looking for design researchers who can dive into complex user research challenges and create solutions to help transform the healthcare industry. If you’re an innovative, resourceful problem solver, motivated to make a difference in healthcare, then we want to talk to you. Help us break through all the red tape and transform everyone’s experience of a visit to the doctor, a trip to the emergency room, or a lifetime with a chronic illness.
Position Summary:We consider foundational knowledge of users, jobs-to-be-done and healthcare-specific subject matter to be an essential ingredient to designing and building products that are useful, usable, and have strong product-market fit. In this role, you will define, plan, and lead strategic research activities during our Discovery phase of product development (Surfacing unmet user needs, acquired knowledge -- internally and externally - to understand the “why” behind unmet needs, investigating opportunities, using research to explain complex topics). In addition, you will run experiments to determine ways to surface user knowledge, and contribute to the development of an experience definition framework for our over 1,000 member R&D Organization. Your research will gather existing in-house knowledge, identify gaps, and build-upon that knowledge with new qualitative research with our end users, and you will work closely with our quantitative research team to seek opportunities to integrate quant and qual data to create compelling stories and insights.
Responsibilities may include, but are not limited to:
50% - Research, analysis, & synthesis

• Conduct qualitative research with both end users and in-house subject matter experts such as interviews & field studies to understand and user workflows, goals, jobs, unmet needs, satisfaction, and behavior
• Collect, combine, and analyze complex qualitative and quantitative data from different sources and formats and distill into manageable, actionable, and shareable outputs
• Conduct secondary research through literature review and gathering of existing knowledge
• Persuasively present and package insights for the athenahealth organization

30% - Discovery Research Framework contributions

• Contribute to the creation and roll-out of a discovery framework by assisting with the creation and testing of discovery research tools and services
• Contribute to the creation, test, and roll-out of a User Insights vault for knowledge acquisition, synthesis, and dissemination
• Help build and teach tools (e.g., dashboards) that designers, product owners, engineers, and leadership use to obtain data-driven insights about athenaNet users
• Execute on Experience Measurement Framework strategies and tactics including development of survey instruments, testing templates, decision trees, and playbooks

20% - General Research and Mentorship

• Guide junior members of the team through mentorship and work reviews
• Participate in team-wide initiatives to improve processes and practices
• Participate in team-wide research services such as research office hours, expert reviews, and data coding activities
• Teach and grow best practices for foundational and discovery techniques

Education, Experience, & Skills Required

• Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Psychology, Anthropology, Human Factors, Information Science, Computer Science, Business, or related disciplines
• 4-5+ years of professional experience
• Extensive experience conducting foundational user research: ethnography, interviewing, surveying, contextual inquiries and related best-practice methods and tools
• Experience facilitating workshops and/or group activities
• Knowledge of concepts, features, and practices of user-centered design, ability to apply this methodology to improve solution quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements; evaluate success of efforts based on usage, perception and performance.
• Familiarity/interest in healthcare industry trends, directions, major issues, regulatory considerations and trendsetters.

Behaviors & Abilities Required:

• Excellent written and presentation communication skills
• Advanced synthesis skills and compelling storytelling ability
• Offers useful ideas for positioning issues and persuading others
• Finds creative ways to execute even when there’s not a predetermined path or map to follow
• Ability to surface, understand, and connect business drivers to research findings
• Takes ownership of own development and career growth by learning new skills, seeking challenges, and continuously pushing one’s limits
• Builds consensus and alignment among stakeholders
• Consistently achieves results, even under tough circumstances
• Adjusts approach in different or changing situations
• Makes sense of complex, high quantity, and sometimes contradictory information to effectively solve problems

The Opportunity:Join athenahealth’s quest to make healthcare work the way it should. Our health is incredibly precious, and people in need of health care are often at their most fragile. Yet the function and experience of healthcare continues to fall far behind the innovative services we receive in other more frivolous parts of our lives.
Over the last decade, athenahealth has grown a mature experience design team. The digital products we build to enable athenahealth services are best-in-class, but we know there is still much room for improvement. We are pushing to make evidence-based experience design a central competency and competitive lever. Core to that mission is the establishment of our Experience Measurement Framework that informs product design & development from conception to in-market iteration. As a part of this framework, the design research team provides qualitative and quantitative tools and guidance to our scrum teams that include product owners, product designers, and engineers.
athenahealth is looking for design researchers who can dive into complex user research challenges and create solutions to help transform the healthcare industry. If you’re an innovative, resourceful problem solver, motivated to make a difference in healthcare, then we want to talk to you. Help us break through all the red tape and transform everyone’s experience of a visit to the doctor, a trip to the emergency room, or a lifetime with a chronic illness.
Position Summary:We consider foundational knowledge of users, jobs-to-be-done and healthcare-specific subject matter to be an essential ingredient to designing and building products that are useful, usable, and have strong product-market fit. In this role, you will define, plan, and lead strategic research activities during our Discovery phase of product development (Surfacing unmet user needs, acquired knowledge -- internally and externally - to understand the “why” behind unmet needs, investigating opportunities, using research to explain complex topics). In addition, you will run experiments to determine ways to surface user knowledge, and contribute to the development of an experience definition framework for our over 1,000 member R&D Organization. Your research will gather existing in-house knowledge, identify gaps, and build-upon that knowledge with new qualitative research with our end users, and you will work closely with our quantitative research team to seek opportunities to integrate quant and qual data to create compelling stories and insights.
Responsibilities may include, but are not limited to:
50% - Research, analysis, & synthesis

• Conduct qualitative research with both end users and in-house subject matter experts such as interviews & field studies to understand and user workflows, goals, jobs, unmet needs, satisfaction, and behavior
• Collect, combine, and analyze complex qualitative and quantitative data from different sources and formats and distill into manageable, actionable, and shareable outputs
• Conduct secondary research through literature review and gathering of existing knowledge
• Persuasively present and package insights for the athenahealth organization

30% - Discovery Research Framework contributions

• Contribute to the creation and roll-out of a discovery framework by assisting with the creation and testing of discovery research tools and services
• Contribute to the creation, test, and roll-out of a User Insights vault for knowledge acquisition, synthesis, and dissemination
• Help build and teach tools (e.g., dashboards) that designers, product owners, engineers, and leadership use to obtain data-driven insights about athenaNet users
• Execute on Experience Measurement Framework strategies and tactics including development of survey instruments, testing templates, decision trees, and playbooks

20% - General Research and Mentorship

• Guide junior members of the team through mentorship and work reviews
• Participate in team-wide initiatives to improve processes and practices
• Participate in team-wide research services such as research office hours, expert reviews, and data coding activities
• Teach and grow best practices for foundational and discovery techniques

Education, Experience, & Skills Required

• Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Psychology, Anthropology, Human Factors, Information Science, Computer Science, Business, or related disciplines
• 4-5+ years of professional experience
• Extensive experience conducting foundational user research: ethnography, interviewing, surveying, contextual inquiries and related best-practice methods and tools
• Experience facilitating workshops and/or group activities
• Knowledge of concepts, features, and practices of user-centered design, ability to apply this methodology to improve solution quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements; evaluate success of efforts based on usage, perception and performance.
• Familiarity/interest in healthcare industry trends, directions, major issues, regulatory considerations and trendsetters.

Behaviors & Abilities Required:

• Excellent written and presentation communication skills
• Advanced synthesis skills and compelling storytelling ability
• Offers useful ideas for positioning issues and persuading others
• Finds creative ways to execute even when there’s not a predetermined path or map to follow
• Ability to surface, understand, and connect business drivers to research findings
• Takes ownership of own development and career growth by learning new skills, seeking challenges, and continuously pushing one’s limits
• Builds consensus and alignment among stakeholders
• Consistently achieves results, even under tough circumstances
• Adjusts approach in different or changing situations
• Makes sense of complex, high quantity, and sometimes contradictory information to effectively solve problems