Senior User Researcher

The Senior Researcher role is a senior level research position, in the Research & Insights team at Zone.

The Research & Insights team is part of the Strategy craft, and is a team of mixed methodology researchers, conducting primary and secondary research, across customer and employee experience. We generate value for businesses by creating transformative customer experiences, helping our clients to understand their value proposition, and supporting digital design through from discovery to scale.

Zone in a nutshell

Zone is an experience consultancy - part of the Cognizant family – made up of strategists, designers, engineers and delivery experts. We transform the businesses the world relies on by creating and orchestrating exceptional experiences for their customers, employees and partners.

Zone does this for some of the world’s biggest brands at every stage of their transformation journey – whether that’s by deeply understanding customers to reimagine the journey, rapidly creating new products and services that deliver value, or by scaling innovation across large-scale enterprises.

Role

• Conducting research by applying the appropriate techniques (e.g., interviews, observational, surveys, A/B testing, usability testing, diary studies, field studies and ethnography) throughout the research activities to support, validate or determine the scale of impact
• Creating holistic, responsible, and inclusive research plans (especially accessibility best practices) including key dependencies, planned timelines, data privacy and cadence for synthesis with the teams

• Using synthesis to determine if additional research or data is needed if the questions are answered or research goals are reached. Pivot and adapt the research approach if it becomes apparent that the goals won't be fully met
• Building the materials needed to execute research (questions, surveys, introduction emails, scripts, etc)
• Setting up process to feed findings back into respective teams in an agile and iterative manner to drive and inform the work of partner disciplines
• Framing research plans by clearly defining research goals, scope and outcomes of the research, and the key information, questions, outputs that need to be provided, as well as risks to and assumptions about conducting this research
• Planning research using a variety of research methods, techniques, partners, and tools to get the best outcomes within the programme timelines. Ensures that research process involves other disciplines to foster an inclusive and cross-disciplinary approach

• Turning themes into insights, which identify the context of the information and impact to designs, business, people, etc. to articulate why each finding matters

Requirements

• Comfortable over seeing a research project or research stream within a project from end to end (planning, conducting research, synthesis & insight generation) with limited supervision.

• Experience using qualitative research methodologies such as 1:1 interviews, focus group moderation, and usability testing; and quantitative research techniques including survey scripting, fielding and cross tabulation analysis. Synthesising information to identify and share themes and trends in the research findings in a format in line with project norms
• Experience building strong client relationships
• Active listening skills, curiosity, observations and empathy as part of research conducted to understand behaviours, motivations, blockers and preferences across the end-to-end experience
• Interest in providing direction in building a clear, logical, and persuasive narrative linked to business objectives and contributes to enhancing the business narrative to bring together business and user needs, and create impactful recommendations
• Able to shape and solution work based on client needs and outcomes, being “experience led” and an understanding how research feeds into experience strategy and service design to bring value to the businesses and users.

Our offices are open and we love to get together and collaborate with our colleagues. We're all hybrid working, so we'd like you to come into the offices at least two days a week

Our Values

We are inclusive - We value diverse opinions, backgrounds and ways of thinking with a multi- disciplinary, collaborative approach to solving problems

We do what we say - We value action and deliver what we promise at speed, which earns trust with clients and colleagues who thrive on feeling empowered to take the lead

We are kind - We value empathy over ego and insist on a healthy work/life balance so our people feel safe and secure, and know their opinion truly matters

We say what we believe - We value honest words delivered with respect, and we’re not afraid to have difficult conversations with each other, our clients and partners.

At Zone & Cognizant, we create conditions for everyone to thrive. We treat others with fairness and respect, and value each other’s individual contributions. We never discriminate against a person’s legally protected characteristics, such as age, gender reassignment, marital status, pregnancy or maternity leave, disability, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation, when we make employment decisions including recruiting, hiring, training, promotion, termination, or providing other terms and conditions of employment. Our continued commitment to promoting diversity, inclusion and a sense of belonging is crucial to allowing the organisation to attract and retain talent with the skills and expertise needed to exceed our clients’ expectations.  We recognise that our people are our most important asset.  As a result, we strive to cultivate an inclusive work environment in which all employees feel valued, are engaged and have the opportunity to develop and succeed.

One last thing – all employees of Zone and Cognizant are subject to background vetting. This includes, amongst other things, criminal record check and employment references.