User Experience Research Manager
Cars.com
Chicago, IL, USA
Help us learn about our users! Cars.com, a top-tier online destination for automobile shoppers and sellers, seeks an experienced and passionate User Experience Research Manager to continue to grow our user research practice.
The User Experience Research Manager will collaborate closely with other user experience managers, product managers, marketing managers, editors, designers and front-end developers to design and conduct user research studies throughout the product cycle. The User Experience Research Manager will also be responsible for managing our in-house usability testing lab, including lab equipment, software, policies and procedures.
This position will offer broad exposure across Cars.com and excellent advancement opportunities. In this role you will:
- Continue to improve our research process for testing product changes and gathering user feedback throughout the product development lifecycle.
- Advise and guide project teams in planning user research activities that inform and support product development; help teams determine best research methodology to use to meet business objectives.
- Coordinate and execute all phases of usability testing performed in our in-house lab, including developing screeners, consent forms, test plans and interview guides and moderating usability lab sessions and managing lab setup.
- Manage test recruiting, partnering with vendors to recruit external test candidates and navigating the business to recruit internal users when necessary.
- Provide post-research analysis and top-line reports; make recommendations to project teams based on research findings.
- Manage and administer site-wide feedback surveys; provide survey analysis and reports; make recommendations to key stakeholders.
- Collaborate with our Marketing team on large-scale user research initiatives.
- Help product teams plan and execute external user-research and usability tests with research vendors as needed.
- Manage in-house usability lab, including hardware and software assets used for testing.
- Make user-testing budget recommendations.
- Be an advocate for user research early and often in the process.
Required skills and experience:
- Experience planning and conducting different kinds of research, including heuristic evaluations, card sorts, mental models, persona development, paper prototypes, focus group moderation and usability tests.
- Patience for long term research initiatives but the flexibility to do just-in-time guerilla-style research as well.
- Must be highly organized and be able to juggle and lead multiple user-testing initiatives in varying stages simultaneously.
- Willingness to 'get your hands dirty' managing all steps of the usability testing process.
- Excellent written and oral communication skills; strong relationship-building skills
- Experience presenting research findings and recommendations to all levels of stakeholders, including executive management.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Human Factors, Cognitive or Experimental Psychology, Cognitive Science, Anthropology, Information design or related field (or equivalent professional experience) required.
- At least five years experience conducting and leading user research, applying a variety of research methodologies including usability testing, in a corporate or consulting environment. Direct experience managing an in-house testing lab and basic A/V knowledge a plus.
To Apply:
Received: 18-Sep-08
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