Overview
What will you do? As a Director of Design Research in Product Design at T3 (Material+), you will play a leading role in our team and process. We are looking for someone with inspiring leadership, mentoring, and design direction skills and experience. You’ll lead and conduct research, synthesize key insights, and develop the strategies and ideal user experience of experiential platforms, apps, and websites.
Our design research directors are responsible for leading the discovery phase within the product design process, conducting iterative research, presenting findings to clients, and working in tandem with our in-house and client research, UX, design, and development teams.
About us
With a demonstrated track record of innovation and rapid growth, Material is built and powered by analytics, deep human understanding, and design thinking! Material is a modern marketing services company that helps teams solve their toughest business challenges – building strategies, products, and experiences that make brands more vital to their customers. Our capabilities are wide and varied, but our approach is forward-thinking and calibrated to any size challenge across Analytics, Insights, Growth Strategy, Brand Marketing, Product Design, and Loyalty & CRM.
We’ve spent 40+ years uncovering what’s important to people and creating experiences that make an impact. We work globally across all industries, and with many of the world’s largest and most remarkable brands. To do this well, we depend on a team and organizational culture that reflects, values, and understands the importance of diverse communities, backgrounds, and cultures. We’re one team from many disciplines.
Researchers and strategists. Data miners and definers. Creators and technologists. Designers and storytellers. Learn more .
Responsibilities
Management:
• Stay with projects from start to near finish as a member of the business operating team
• Manage and oversee the work of senior or associate design researchers or user experience designers
• Keep abreast of research industry standards and developments and act as a long-term point of reference and design research and user experience advocate both internally and externally
• Participate in product design leadership meetings, design research team meetings, further developing the processes and activities for our business unit
• Participate in new business pitches
Product Discovery & Definition:
• Direct the discovery phase with a multi-disciplinary team including content strategists, ux copywriters, design researchers, product designers and client teams
• Conduct stakeholder interviews and worksessions to deduce key business goals and KPIs
• Conduct user interviews and baseline testing
• Leading both generative and evaluative research, producing a range of deliverables not limited to heuristics analysis, archetypes, competitive research, experience mapping, user journeys, user flows
• Visualize research insights into a more digestible fashion in both presentation decks and tools such as miro
• You will tie research insights directly to opportunities and co-conduct opportunity prioritization working sessions
Product Design Phase:
• Collaborate with design in brainstorming and whiteboarding sessions
• Ensure design research insights and opportunities are carried through in design
• Conduct usability testing and product concept testing and present findings throughout the agile design process
• Compare baseline findings to prototype testing findings
• Co-conduct working sessions and workshops throughout the design process
Requirements
Who are you?
• You are kind, insightful, analytical, curious, eager, collaborative, empathetic, adaptive, communicative, experienced
• You solve problems given to you, and you strategically solve problems that may be unseen by others
• You understand the purpose of design research within an agile human-centered design approach and have experience shaping this discipline within the product design context, bringing your unique points-of-view to the table
• You are a leader who drives projects forward, supporting client team integration & collaboration
• You work beyond the template of classic design research deliverables to create what is necessary and useful to any given project
• You know how to create compelling stories, tying research insights to design initiatives verbally and visually
• You have a background in user experience design or direction
• You lead with qualitative research, but have direct experience supporting with quantitative insights
• You help drive
• You are able to see the big picture, and understand the details are just as important
• You have 10+ years of related experience and a portfolio showing design research process and direction leading to innovative deliverables
