Specialist, 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!

The Role:

Nationwide is looking for a developing User Experience (UX) Researcher 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. We are the group at Nationwide that is charged with taking calculated bets to transform our company and industry before someone else does.

As a UX Researcher, 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.

Your role will involve partnering with senior research leads and broader innovation product teams as we employ a human-centered process to explore problem spaces and move solutions through the design phases of concepting, prototyping, and bringing a minimum viable product (MVP) to market.

This is a rare and exciting opportunity to participate in a truly 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:

You are schooled in “design thinking” and human-centered design with a solid understanding of UX design principles and best practices as well as agile product development. You should be comfortable participating in brainstorming, workshops, and other idea-generating sessions to share, iterate, and help move teams forward. You will work collaboratively with many others including product managers, business leads, designers, content writers and developers, so you must possess strong communication and organizational skills.

Most crucial is your familiarity with the fundamentals in several research methodologies. We may expect you to participate in ethnography, contextual inquiry, concept evaluation, usability studies, and heuristic evaluations. You must have a willingness to learn, grow, and improve your observation and interview moderation skills as well as your ability to analyze and synthesize qualitative and quantitative information and present the results.

You have an ability to build positive, collaborative relationships across teams and organizations. You can switch easily between different projects, and flex to handle rapidly changing scenarios while delivering quality results. You have strong 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.

Key Responsibilities:

• Help plan and execute research activities that result in actionable findings and recommendations to drive user-centered ideation, definition, and design
• Assist with all aspects of research including recruiting, logistics, moderation, and data collection.
• Contribute to synthesis of qualitative and quantitative customer data to inform research and design activities
• Participate in ideation and collaborative workshops as required
• Communicate and present findings and recommendations verbally and via documentation to team members and stakeholders

Compensation grade F4

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 Specialist 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 an 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 work on project 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: 

• Provides creative, technical and strategic input and results to project teams.

• Collaborates with partners, product managers, technologists, UX peers and others across the company on technical and creative direction.

• Advocates for empathetic human-centered design and helps mitigate risks 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.

• Participates in idea-generating sessions and helps capture and evaluate ideas with respect to technical feasibility, business viability and human desirability.

• Able to think strategically and connect work to a larger picture.

May perform other responsibilities as assigned.

Reporting Relationships: Reports to Manager/Director. This is an individual contributor role.

Typical Skills and Experiences:  

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

Experience: Typically, three or more years professionally practicing some aspect of human-centered design.

Knowledge, Abilities and Skills: Good verbal and written communication skills. Comfortable explaining design rationale to other parts of the business. Basic understanding of UX principles and the human-centered design process. Ability to partner with multiple partner groups and tell compelling narratives. Owns work with some manager oversight. Independently and proactively seeks out answers as needed. Proven 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 with cross-functional teams.

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.