Job Description
Sr Consultant, User Experience (Researcher Innovation)
Ohio United States – Remote
Full time
81134
If you’re passionate about helping a Fortune 100 company drive their strategy forward through innovative product development and advancing strategic partnerships to protect customers (and their pets), then Nationwide’s Strategy and Corporate Development Office might be the place for you!
The Role:
Nationwide is looking for a seasoned User Experience (UX) Research Lead to join our team focused on innovation efforts to design and launch products, services, and experiences that realize our enterprise strategies and solve for real customer needs. We are critical enablers of core business success and imaginative thought leaders for the organization.
As a UX Research Lead, you are an instrumental member of the Innovation Design team who engages directly with target customers to identify key unmet needs, assess the desirability of opportunities, and the usability of design solutions. You will design learning plans and identify research methodologies that align with your team’s objectives. In partnership with your team, you will execute research, analyze and synthesize results, and inform product strategy based on findings. Ultimately, you will partner with designers and others throughout the organization to prototype solutions and get them to market with the intention of learning more to grow and scale an MVP.
This is a rare and exciting opportunity to participate in a human-centered approach to helping a Fortune 100 company drive our strategy forward through innovative product development to protect people, businesses, and futures with extraordinary care.
Ideal Candidate:
The ideal candidate will be schooled in design thinking and human-centered design with demonstrated experience contributing to experience strategy and product development. You have working knowledge of UX design principles and best practices, prototyping, and agile software development. You excel at sharing, evangelizing and iterating ideas with a team and other stakeholders. You possess a quick and keen understanding of current and future design patterns, research methodologies, consumer psychology, and business strategy. Most crucial is your deep expertise and practice of the fundamentals in a number of research methodologies, especially ethnography, contextual inquiry, and rapid testing of concepts, and your ability to identify the appropriate methodology given the learning objectives.
The ability to communicate and influence design solutions that best meet user needs and business objectives will be critical as you’ll be counted on for high-level, out-of-the-box thinking and the ability to lead a team through the human-centered design process.
You have experience using storyboards, wireframes, rough screen shots or other visual aids for concept research. You have proven moderation skills in observation, interview, and laboratory plus the ability to analyze and synthesize qualitative and quantitative information and present the results to stakeholders. You have an exemplary ability to build positive, collaborative relationships across teams/groups/functions. You can switch easily between different projects, and flex to handle rapidly changing scenarios while delivering quality results. You have excellent verbal and written communication skills, strong project management skills, and the ability to prioritize and manage multiple, parallel projects to deadline in a fast-paced environment.
Things we expect you’ll do as an innovation research lead
- Participate in the human driven innovation process with cross functional team members
- Collaborate with product managers, designers, researchers, technologists, and business leads in order to achieve the best outcome
- Lead rapid prototyping of ideas and solutions directly with consumers and customers
- Clearly define the right problems to solve (the what) and ensure we have the right end to end solutions to solve them (the how)
- Uncover and communicate insights in a compelling way that helps your audience make informed business decisions
- Understand that failure is part of innovation process, with the ability to prove that we’ve failed, learn and move on
- Anticipate where relevant companies, trends, and technologies might be going and inform strategies appropriately
UX at Nationwide
Over the last several years, Nationwide has made a commitment to invest in customer-centric solutions. Our UX organization is a large, dynamic team with a diverse culture that embraces the value of strategic design thinking. We’re approximately 100-associates strong and we collaborate across all UX disciplines and have a highly engaging, friendly (hybrid/remote) work environment. Design has a seat at the table and contributes to strategic decision-making to help us protect people, businesses, and futures with extraordinary care.
Compensation grade H4
Job Description Summary
Do you shine in at least one core user experience (UX) competency? We have a passion for creating exceptional experiences that have a real impact on people’s live and futures. If you understand the value UX provides in achieving strategic objectives and can articulate that value to cross-functional teams and business partners, we want to know more about you!
As a Senior Consultant in the User Experience organization, you’ll be viewed as an expert with the ability to drive the delivery of outstanding customer experiences. In addition to expertise in one core UX strength (experience strategy, research, information architecture, interaction design, interface design, front-end development, content strategy or design operations), you’ll need to demonstrate a thorough grasp of a couple others. It’ll be important to have a deep understanding of the design process and an ability to work in ambiguous discovery phase of identifying the right problem to tackle and the detail delivering desirable products. You’ll also have opportunities to lead project teams to distill complex problems into clear solutions that exemplify standard methodologies and encourage others. You are a visionary and will need to be adept at articulating and defending design decisions in a way that can be understood.
Job Description
Key Responsibilities:
- Consults and collaborates with stakeholders, product managers, technologists, UX peers and others across the company to provide strategic, creative and technical direction.
- Advocates for empathetic, human-centered design. Helps mitigate risk by pursuing work based on insights and an understanding of our users.
- Problem solves, thinks big, influences, and explores divergent ideas while understanding how to converge and build iteratively towards the best solution.
- Designs and recommends innovative multi-platform solutions that balance customer needs with business viability and technical feasibility.
- Participates in and facilitates idea-generating sessions evaluating those ideas with regards to technical feasibility, business viability and human desirability.
- Able to think strategically and connect your work to a larger picture. Helps everyone consider the end-to-end experience and connect the dots.
- Mentors and guides the team in their craft and profession to continually uplift the quality of our work.
- Perceive rapid advancements in technology and how customers expect to interact with our company.
May perform other responsibilities as assigned.
Reporting Relationships: Reports to Manager/Director. May have opportunity to manage a team based on organizational structure. May also have opportunity to lead matrixed and virtual/project teams.
Typical Skills and Experiences:
Education: Undergraduate degree in UX, human-computer interaction, psychology, graphic design, information science, communications or related field preferred.
Experience: Typically, eight or more years professionally practicing some aspect of human-centered design.
Knowledge, Abilities and Skills: Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Comfortable speaking publicly to large groups and explaining design rationale to other parts of the business. Able to leverage data to make informed design decisions. Ability to navigate multiple partner groups, tell compelling narratives and influence others. Owns work with minimal oversight. Very independent and self-motivated. Can provide leadership for all aspects of the design process, as well as areas outside field of expertise.
Excellent communications skills (written and verbal). Clear user experience design focus; proven familiarity with emerging technologies and the ability to integrate new technologies to user experience designs. Strong interpersonal skills; ability to work effectively independently and in partnership with cross-functional teams. Proven project management skills; ability to perform well on multiple concurrent projects and meet timelines. Strong research, analytical, and troubleshooting skills. Acts as a source of expertise for direction, mentoring and guidance for less experienced team members. Works with development team to resolve technically complex issues requiring alignment across multiple business partners and subject areas. Understand and make progress toward the company’s consumer performance indicator (CPI) and key performance indicator (KPI) goals
Other criteria, including leadership skills, competencies and experiences may take precedence.