Consultant, User Experience Researcher

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!

Nationwide UX is seeking a talented user experience researcher to join our growing team and help realize our vision of becoming the most trusted, most caring and most customer-focused protection company. This role supports Retirement Solutions product design.

In your role, you will drive strategic design research activities, including planning, designing appropriate research methodologies; executing research studies; and providing strategic design thinking throughout the design process.

Experience with a variety of generative and evaluative research methodologies is desired, including contextual interviews, participatory design sessions, ethnographic studies, concept evaluation, usability studies and heuristic evaluations. You will translate research findings into customer insights and design recommendations and share these verbally and via documentation.

Most important, your job as a researcher is represent the voice of the customer and help the UX team and its business partners understand what would make a user’s experience feel more meaningful, intuitive, accessible, fun—and even magical. Along the way, you’ll champion the value of user research and educate others in its potential.

Your role will involve a high level of collaboration with others, including product design leads, interaction designers, content strategists, product managers, development teams and more across multiple lines of business, so you must possess strong communication and organization skills. You will present work to peers and stakeholders and build productive relationships. You should enjoy participating in design workshops, brainstorming and other idea-generating sessions.

You’ll join a UX team of 80+ multi-disciplinary professionals. We proudly come from a variety of backgrounds – human factors, cultural anthropology, industrial design, and product design to name a few, and some you might expect less like journalism, genetic engineering, and young start-ups. What we share is a passion for human-centered design and solving real-world problems in ways that align with Nationwide’s strategic objectives.

We work out of a new 31,000 square-foot innovation center in Columbus’s vibrant downtown Arena District, but this position can work remotely. Over the last several years, Nationwide has made a commitment to invest in customer-centric solutions. It’s an exciting time where Design has a seat at the table, and you can play a key role in helping us drive a return on this investment.

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.