Senior UX Researcher

BitSight is transforming how companies manage information security risk with trusted, time-tested and actionable security ratings. Founded in 2011, the company built its Security Ratings Platform to continuously analyze vast amounts of external data on security issues and behaviors in order to help organizations manage third party risk, underwrite cyber insurance policies, benchmark performance, and assess aggregate risk. Organizations worldwide, including seven of the top 10 cyber insurers, 20% of Fortune 500 companies, and 4 of the top 5 investment banks use BitSight’s proven Security Ratings technology on a daily basis to make integral risk and business decisions. With over 2,000 customers and the largest ecosystem of users and information, BitSight is the most widely used Security Ratings Service. We solve interesting problems and help make the world a safer place. 

About the Role

BitSight is seeking our first Senior UX Researcher to grow and expand our research practice. Our UX Design team is proud of the practice we’ve built, with regular access to customers for interviews, usability testing, surveys, and navigation studies, and excellent tools for gathering and analyzing usage data.  We’ve completed some significant user experience improvement projects and shown the positive impact on sales and customer retention. Now we want to take our practice to the next level, increase strategic discovery research, and continuously measure and improve user experience across our product lines. The ideal candidate will bring a self-motivated, experimental mindset, deep experience with several qualitative and quantitative research methods, and the ability to tell persuasive stories about users, their jobs, and the challenges we can help them overcome. This role has the potential to grow into leading a research team as BitSight grows.

Location: Boston, Raleigh, Lisbon, or remote

Responsibilities

• Lead and execute research projects throughout the product lifecycle and across multiple product lines. Establish a vision and roadmap for research and manage collaboration with stakeholders.
• Understand business requirements and align research roadmap with business goals.
• Work cross-functionally with Product Designers, Product Managers, Business Analytics, Engineering, Data Science, Marketing, and customer-facing teams as needed to understand users, plan research, share research discoveries, and define and implement solutions. 
• Plan and execute discovery research to understand users and their jobs and uncover opportunities for innovation.
• Use inspection methods and usability testing to create a prioritized list of product improvements.
• Identify and recruit appropriate users for your studies.
• Participate in design reviews and critique design work in progress based on your research observations and knowledge of users.
• Create presentations, user journeys, personas, video clips and other artifacts to effectively communicate research findings, build empathy for users, and drive action
• Gather and analyze quantitative data from surveys and usage tracking systems (e.g., Pendo). Combine quantitative and qualitative data to provide a richer understanding. 
• Mentor product designers to help them grow their research expertise.
• Continuously improve research operations to improve quality, consistency, and efficiency of research practices. Develop guidelines, templates, and processes. Make research findings discoverable and usable over time and across teams. 
• Work with Legal, Security, Finance, and others as needed to ensure research practices are in compliance with their guidance. 

Minimum Qualifications

• Significant hands-on experience and proven results with several qualitative and quantitative UX research methods, including interviews, observation, usability testing, and surveys. 
• Hands-on experience with planning, executing, analyzing and reporting on UX research methods including interviews and usability testing. Selects the most appropriate research method for the study goals.
• Skilled at facilitating sessions with users: makes users comfortable, avoids bias, elicits useful data, manages time and technology well.
• Ability to work on a highly collaborative UX Design team and to provide objective feedback on designs grounded in research.
• Experience working in a dynamic, fast-paced software development context.
• Superior listening, observing, communication, and critical thinking skills.
• Persuasive and storytelling skills to present results in a way that sparks action.
• General knowledge of statistics as they relate to UX research methods.
• Organized, curious, adaptable, and self-motivated to maintain a rapid research cadence with minimal supervision.
• BA/BS degree in cognitive psychology, human-computer interaction, social sciences, or equivalent experience. Master’s degree desirable. 
• A portfolio demonstrating past work experience and deliverables.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with information architecture research methods such as card sorting, tree testing, and first click testing.
• Experience using Figma, Sketch or similar tools to mock up proposed solutions.
• Experience with Agile development.
• Knowledge of Jobs to be Done framework.