CommunityAmerica is looking for a Lead UX & Market Researcher to help drive the customer research process and design user experiences for our marketing and digital applications. You'll play a key role in helping improve existing offerings, coming up with ideas for new products, experiences, and initiatives, and iterating on early-stage pilots. The Lead UX & Market Researcher will manage end-to-end research from ideation to delivering insights.

The position requires a user-centered and data-informed approach focused on understanding our customers, generating great ideas, and validating those ideas to create products, services and improve existing processes that delight users. Strong skills in communication and relationship building across all organizational levels are part of the success of this role. We use both quantitative and qualitative data to inform our design decisions and deliver experiences that deliver financial well-being for our members. To realize this vision, you will work collaboratively with product managers, engineers, agencies, leadership, and other stakeholders throughout the development lifecycle.

Recommend, design, and execute an array of quantitative and qualitative research projects. Includes planning through analysis, storytelling, and presentation; Able to align the insights or findings with the audience
• Understanding of qualitative, quantitative, user-centered design methodologies, and mixed methods
• Proactively recommend new and innovative ways to enhance the research process that may include reporting, presentations, and artifacts
• Ability to conduct end-to-end research with little or no supervision
• Present findings and actionable insights to stakeholders that include senior-level leadership within the credit union
• Engage directly with users to gain a deep understanding of their goals, validate designs, conduct quick rounds of usability testing, incorporate insights into the design thinking process
• Develop timelines for research projects and other related-operational duties
• Assist with mapping customer journeys, visualizing concepts through storyboards, user workflows, building intuitive interactions, and rapid prototyping
• Iterate and evolve the way we design for and learn from our end users.
• Partner with leadership to generate new ideas and bring them to market
• Help stakeholders understand best practices and approaches for user research
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Education and Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in UX, HCI (psychology/cognitive science), marketing, research, or related field: Master's degree is strongly preferred
• 5 years of industry experience in a user research, customer experience, or market research role; preferably in Fintech or banking
• Experience conducting complex research at scale including qualitative interviews, surveys, ethnographic field research, A/B testing, concept testing, diary studies, and usability evaluation

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

• Proven qualitative user research experience (user interviews, moderated user testing, etc.) and discovery techniques.
• Familiarity with human-centered interaction design
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills - demonstrated ability to work with and through team members.
• Independent, self-starter
• Problem-solving skills - Determine what problems users are experiencing and recognize potential user problems and brainstorm action steps to solve them.
• Analytical thinking mindset - Able to interpret data to identify patterns and solutions, read and develop user and market research findings using logical and scientific reasoning. Advanced understanding of Excel and data analysis.
• Ability to translate information into actionable insights and compellingly communicate ideas.
• Curious, disciplined, with a mindset toward learning and growth. Deeply interested in their work. Enjoy learning about the perspectives of others in the field.
• Attention to detail
• Time and organizational management skills
• Ability to work on projects that are ambiguous
• Understanding of common software project management and agile development

Preferred Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

• Experience with usability testing and research tools such as UserTesting, dscout, Maze, Alchemer, Qualtrics
• Experience using statistical methods, data analysis, and data visualization (i.e., Excel, SPSS, R, Python)
• Understanding of the Design Thinking process