Mode: Long-Term

About the Team

The Design team is a close-knit group of about 30 members with a passion for helping students plan for their future. The UX Research discipline at College Board performs, advocates for, teaches and supports user research. This research informs and validates our strategies and designs leading to the best users’ experience with our products and brand.

UX Research works with all major portfolios across College Board including SAT Suite of Assessments, Advanced Placement, and BigFuture.

UX Research at College Board is a small team who performs user research, advocates for users, and supports team members by teaching them to conduct their own research. Our research informs and validates design work across College Board, leading to better user experiences for the students and educators who interact with our products.

About the Role

The College Board is seeking a Senior UX Researcher to join a small, collaborative UX Research team. As a Senior UX Researcher, you will lead UX Research initiatives and support design discovery and product improvements across multiple touch points and experiences across product portfolios. You will partner with the business and engineering teams to prioritize UX research activities throughout the software development lifecycle by working closely with our program owners to understand their needs and help the team find solutions that serve user needs and achieve business goals.

As a Senior UX Researcher, you will also contribute to the internal UX Research team by helping to define processes that enable product teams to center the user. In this role you will be integral in helping product teams design easy to use products for students and educators.

In this role, you will:

Strategy & Research for Product Development (60%)

• Identify target users and help build hypotheses around user needs for projects

• Plan, develop, own and lead research (generative and evaluative) for your team/products

• Contribute to product roadmaps and help prioritize features based on data

• In addition to research, collect other types of data to inform design decisions/solutions (e.g., surveys, analytics dashboards, accessibility reviews)

• Lead synthesis sessions with your team, following agile and lean methodologies

• Create artifacts to share out UX Research synthesis and decisions and present research result to stakeholders

• Create user journeys and flows to capture current and future states of user pathways to influence planning of MVPs and prospective releases

Contribute to Internal Research Processes (30%)

• Collaborate with the team to promote communication and synchronicity in planning and centering the user in the product development process

• Contribute to the overall research strategy for our product designs, including refining research team processes and research templates

• Coach designers and other product team members on incorporating, advocating for and completing UX Research activities to inform and prioritize work

• Nurture a culture of user empathy and deep curiosity that enables us to build simple, intuitive products for our customers

• Advocate for consistent design processes, methods, core systems, and patterns

Project Management (10%)

• Self-manage workload and obtain necessary requirements and acceptance criteria needed to complete work

• Coordinate with UX Lead, product leads, design team, and engineers to ensure timely delivery of research artifacts

• Help foster an environment for collaboration by partnering with business and other creative units to align our visual design approach with project goals, and the College Board brand

About You

• As a user experience researcher, you are independent in your support of a cross-functional team.

• A portfolio of your work is included in your application that shows examples of your experience leading user research initiatives.

• You have a bachelor’s degree in a related field (computer science, interaction design, HCI, industrial design, information science, social sciences, etc.) and/or equivalent years of work experience.

• You have 5+ years of professional experience of relevant UX Research experience—including experience performing moderated user interviews or usability tests and experience performing at least some of the following: unmoderated usability testing, card sorts, web analytics data analysis, A/B testing, survey creation and analysis, cognitive walk-throughs and heuristic analysis.

• You have experience presenting and delivering research findings to product teams and to stakeholders in a variety of appropriate formats for actionable results.

• You have documented experience in researching for large, content-rich websites and/or applications; proven outcomes that impacted users’ needs.

• You hold a broad knowledge of digital products, web site architecture, user interfaces, and navigation on various platforms (Web, mobile, tablet).

• You have experience guiding and teaching designers and other team members to complete basic research activities.

• You have experience contributing to the simplification of research processes.

• You understand the physical, cognitive, cultural, and social factors that affect design decisions.

• You’re a strong communicator with an ability to demonstrate both leadership and understanding with respect to project partners; self-managing, but also used to working within a team.

• You’re highly adaptable to new information, situations, or challenges and can work independently.

• You like facing new challenges and thrive on opportunities to think creatively and come up with fresh approaches to tough business and operational problems.

• You possess a ‘Product Design’ mindset, who owns the end-to-end design delivery: from strategy to validation of designs in process to establishing and collecting metrics.