Consultant, User Experience - Research Operations

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!

Are you a rock star looking for a new gig?  Do you have a passion for research and human-centered insights?  Are you a collaborator and a supporter of a team-of-teams organization?  If so, we would love to meet you!

The Applied Insights team under UX/Human Centered Practices in the Enterprise Innovation and Digital Organization (EIDO) is looking for a talented Consultant to help drive optimization and scaling of our research operations tools, processes, and experiences. Through collaboration with EIDO and/or enterprise teams on learning needs and research plans, the research operations consultant will support partners through identifying the right research tool for the right learning need, supporting vendors and tool administration, consulting on best practices and evolving relationships with Enterprise Analytics Office (EAO) to drive velocity and confidence in learning and decisions.

We are on a journey to provide empowerment and exceptional experiences for researchers and non-researchers to support customer-centricity throughout the enterprise.  Success in this role includes:

• accountability for the design, development, process and change management for optimization and democratization of our research tools, processes and training including

• advocating for the value of research and for streamlining processes and tools to support the UX researcher team and scaling research more broadly

• providing support and leadership with research operations including consultation, vendor relationships, best practices and continuing evolution of tools, processes and needs support

• evaluating processes and identifying process improvement opportunities. Implement changes, measure, and track improvements over time to demonstrate effectiveness

• establishing and implementing guidelines on how to scale research effectively. Developing and leading programs on research fundamentals and on tools to support research democratization

• developing and maintaining research resources, including screeners, templates, best practices

• supporting the strategy for participant recruitment. Supporting increased demand for coordinating customer research. Ongoing evaluation of recruitment channels and effectiveness with an eye toward continuous improvement

• helping develop and maintain processes and guidelines for governance

• helping establish and enforce processes for storing and sharing research insights

• consulting on research best practices, evolving research tools and relationships with vendors to ensure investment and value are gained

• developing “marketing” tools to ensure adoption and leader support (executive presentations, job-aids, etc.)

For the successful development, the consultant should ideally have:

• Operations, process improvement, and/or change management expertise

• Strong familiarity of ux research and/or worked in a UX organization

• Excellent communication (written & verbal) and interpersonal influencing skills

• Demonstrated ability to simplify and teach complex topics to non-technical audiences

• Strong organizational and analytical skills

• Passion for UX, customer research, and the centralization & democratization of customer insights

• A can-do, relentless optimist outlook

• Proactive, self-starting gumption

• A growth mindset and attitude

• Creative problem-solving skills

• A desire for a collaborative environment within a human-centered team (they should say “we” more often than “I”)

• A love of bringing calm to chaos

• Experience in project and/or product development and execution

• The ability to grasp and craft strategy and tactical needs

• Proven experience in relationship management

• Ability to present recommendations and updates to leadership

• Ability to design and facilitate workshops

Compensation grade G4

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 Consultant in the User Experience organization, in addition to expertise in one core 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 ability to work in the ambiguous discovery phase of identifying the right problem to tackle and the details of delivering desirable products. You’ll also have opportunities to help teams to distill complex problems into clear solutions that exemplify standard methodologies and encourage others. You 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, and explores divergent ideas while understanding how to converge and build iteratively towards the best solution.

• Designs and recommends innovative 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.

May perform other responsibilities as assigned.

Reporting Relationships: Reports to Manager/Director. May have opportunity to manage a team based on organizational structure.

Typical Skills and Experiences:  

Education: Undergraduate studies in UX, human-computer interaction, psychology, graphic design, information science, communications or related field preferred.

Experience: Typically, five 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. Solid, working understanding of UX principles and the human-centered design process. Ability to navigate multiple partner groups and tell compelling narratives. Owns work with little oversight. Independently and proactively seeks out answers as needed. Can provide oversight for a single project or multiple projects.

Skills/Competencies: Ability to analyze qualitative and quantitative information and external factors that may influence or have an impact on the company as well as the customers, distribution systems, operations, and strategy. Proven ability to set work priorities that conform with established objectives, timeframes and accomplish a task in the most effective manner. Ability to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams (e.g., engineers, product managers, designers, business leaders, etc.). Proven ability to manage projects and define administrative methods and procedures to attain objectives.

Other criteria, including leadership skills, competencies and experiences may take precedence.

Staffing exceptions to the above must be approved by the hiring manager’s leader and HR Business Partner.

Values: Regularly and consistently demonstrates the Nationwide Values.

Job Conditions: 

Overtime Eligibility: Exempt (Not Eligible)  

Working Conditions:  Normal Office Environment. Extended work hours may be necessary during heavier volume work periods. Travel required as necessary.

ADA:  The above statements cover what are generally believed to be principal and essential functions of this job. Specific circumstances may allow or require some people assigned to the job to perform a somewhat different combination of duties.