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Senior UX Researcher

Design jobs at Top Hat

Top Hat

We are looking for a Senior Researcher to join our team at Top Hat. Research helps influence the entire product and development process: generative research to assist problem discovery, benchmarking to evaluate design, nurturing new and ongoing relationships with professors, and vetting the final implementation with engineering. Along the way, you’ll also have the opportunity to build your craft by working with Product Designers, Product Managers, and Data Analysts on our growing team. 

In addition to facilitating research, this role will also be foundational in establishing good research ops that enable our main business units: Top Hat Content, Top Hat Pro, and our free offering Top Hat Basic. These products support a breadth of different users that require continual understanding. Our team values user input - Top Hat isn’t a place where you have to fight product team members to show their work to real people. The challenges you’ll get to investigate are nuanced & complex: more than 3 million students are enrolled in courses using Top Hat at 750 of the top 1,000 higher ed institutions in North America.

You will:

    • Spend lots of time with professors and students: hearing from them directly about their challenges and aspirations. Recruiting appropriate participants to ensure the customer voice is always available and heard by the team. Getting team members in front of the right people alongside you.
    • Conduct generative research that informs product strategy: providing empathy, and evidence-based intuition as to which problems are worth solving. And which ones aren’t. How do our choices position Top Hat in the minds of our customers?
    • Collaborate with product and product marketing: influence a team of non-researchers (designer, pm, product marketing) in answering their research questions, and in turn being supported by them in your own growth. Guide non-researchers to a set of coherent research questions from a set of vague desires or product objectives
    • Excited about usability: you’re interested in applying live research techniques: task analysis, contextual inquiry, interviews, and a general familiarity with setup for unmoderated user testing to quantify the efficacy of both new and existing designs.
    • Evolve our team: work with the rest of our product organization to improve our processes and research ops. Supervise summarization and analysis of evidence and coach on the importance of the removal of bias.
    • Move fast: understand the time / quality tradeoffs necessary to empower research in a high-intensity product organization is very helpful.

About you:

    • Minimum of 4–5 years of experience working as a user researcher in a tech or education-based role (or similar role: Senior Researcher, UX Researcher, etc)
    • You’ve experienced the full design process: you’ve understood people, defined problems, helped teams iterate on concepts, and shipped solutions.
    • Your research has had an impact: The findings you’ve shared changed the mindsets and the direction (in a big or small way) a product team was headed. 
    • You’re excited about building accessible products: you have exposure to the ideas of inclusive design and are excited to work with a team that builds interfaces that work for everyone. Familiarity with WCAG 2.1’s AA requirements is a plus. 
    • You take initiative beyond your role: you’re excited to grow your craft beyond your day-to-day work and have examples where you’ve made this happen.
Although not required for this role, we also love to see:
- Familiarity with education: Such as a background in teaching that could give insight or empathy into teaching concerns. Familiarity with standards for academic publishing.
- Experience training teams: you’ve helped systematize the basics of user research for validation (task analysis) and discover (good interviewing techniques, good survey writing skills) with a team of well-meaning product talent

Five reasons people choose to join the Top Hat team:

*Award-winning company and culture. Top Hat has consistently ranked as one of the fastest-growing and best places to work in Canada.
*A single mission that drives every single Top Hatter. We empower educators to engage students and unleash their potential. Our relentless focus on customers is a pretty inspiring idea to wake up to every day.
*A winning long-term strategy and business model. We aim to be the dominant teaching platform in higher education in the world, and our team is making that possible through great content and product solutions that are making a real impact on educators.
*A collaborative team doing really challenging work. What we’ve set out to do is ambitious and hasn’t been done before. Our team works closely together - across departments - to innovate and improve the lives of educators and students. 
*Great benefits, rewards, and career opportunities. We offer competitive benefits, an amazing workplace culture, and lots of room for career growth. For those who invest in themselves at Top Hat, the sky’s the limit.

About Top Hat: 

Top Hat is the only all-in-one courseware platform that enables active learning—a proven student-centered teaching pedagogy that promotes deep understanding, critical thinking, and subject mastery—with interactive content, tools, and activities. Millions of students at 750 leading North American colleges and universities use Top Hat to teach and engage with students before, during, and after class, in both in-person and online education.

Headquartered in Toronto, Top Hat has consistently been recognized as one of the fastest-growing technology companies in North America.

Top Hat welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.
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