Principal User Experience Researcher, Yahoo Comms

Yahoo serves as a trusted guide for hundreds of millions of people globally, helping them achieve their goals online through our portfolio of iconic products. For advertisers, Yahoo Advertising offers omnichannel solutions and powerful data to engage with our brands and deliver results.

 A Little About Us

The Research team is committed to championing people-centered experiences that bridge the gap between our users, designers, product managers, engineers, marketing, and editorial to generate empathy and identify opportunities to improve our product experiences. We are a team embedded across product organizations. We sit side by side with all of the teams and work hard to ensure collaboration, communication, and visibility. We are looking to hire an experienced User Experience Researcher to play a critical role in our Yahoo Communications (Comms) research team. 

A Lot About You

As a Principal User Researcher, you have a proven track record of shaping and delivering a wide range of generative and evaluative UX research projects across the entirety of the product life cycle. Your thought leadership and deliverables will be critical in our ongoing effort to better enable product and design teams to make informed, confident decisions and to set the strategy for future products and features. 

At Yahoo, you will collaborate with a multitude of stakeholders in a challenging environment to deliver key insights that will drive the next generation of our products. We are a fast-moving company, and direct experience in both traditional and modern approaches to recruitment, diverse research methods, and impactful reporting is a must. No matter if you are engaging in usability studies, survey design, competitive analysis, usage data analysis, contextual inquiry, or ethnographic research, you are a deep and insightful thinker who both revels in the challenge of a complex problem and can bring a fresh perspective to your work. 

Specifically, the Principal User Experience Researcher will work in Yahoo Comms, formerly Yahoo Mail, focusing on iterative and innovative product research where there is a need for a well-versed mixed methods researcher. We are looking for someone with demonstrated expertise in generative and evaluative research methodologies (qualitative and quantitative) with experience in UX Research, and some experience in market research/consumer insights. 

In addition, the principal researcher will have strong consumer sense, business acumen, strategic thinking, and the ability to see the big picture. Having effective problem-solving and communication skills as well as good common sense, will enable you to succeed in this role. You’ll have a broad scope of responsibilities and opportunities to make a significant impact on product and business, as a strategic and tactical partner to Yahoo Comms’ decision-makers through pre-, mid-, and post-decision stages.

What you’ll be doing

• Identifying research needs and key research objectives in partnership with product, design, and engineering teams to address research needs for a variety of products and projects throughout the product life cycle. 

• Choosing the right research to do at the right time and synthesizing results into a coherent and truthful story, as well as creating effective models and frameworks that reflect those results, such as task flows, journey maps, mind maps, and user segments. 

• Working with product and design teams in identifying research needs and creating optimal studies tackling right problems using the appropriate research methods (moderated and unmoderated remote interviews, usability tests, diary studies, surveys, CSAT, concept tests, needs/market sizing, heuristic evaluation, competitive analysis, ...)

• Using both qualitative and quantitative research methods and employing mixed methods when necessary. 

• Syntheizing learnings across different studies, and deriving in-depth and actionable insights

• Designing compelling and digestible deliverables focused on visually telling the story and highlighting important insights for longevity, providing a holistic point of view with necessary product behavioral data, working closely with Yahoo Analytics

• Socializing, collaborating, and presenting research to multiple teams and leaders across the organization 

Other additional responsibilities

• Mentoring junior and mid-level UX researchers by providing guidance, feedback, and support, to ensure the quality of research work and contribute to the overall success and growth of the research team.

• Collaborating to define best practice frameworks, research methodologies and documentation surrounding research activities

Qualifications - What you will bring to the table

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