User Researcher

We are looking for a User Researcher to work for a consultancy to be based onsite with a Public Sector client. This will be a 6 month contract based in Telford paying up to £440 per day In Scope of IR35. Role Description: Generate new and useful user insights and translate them into features and actions that will allow service/product managers to iteratively improve their service for users. Tasks: - Plan, design and conduct in-house research to test new service ideas and concept development (including user requirements gathering, early stage concept and prototype testing, guerrilla research and usability testing sessions, and other approaches to ensure the user need is fully understood in the service design). - Lead the formal usability testing process for a digital service from developing user recruitment briefs through to test moderation, analysis and report writing. - Work with Service/Product Managers to devise appropriate research strategies to generate focused insights and to convert concepts into high quality stimulus material. - Work closely with designers, business analysts and software developers to turn user data into actionable user stories that influence product/service direction and prototype development. - Design, script and analyse ad-hoc quantitative surveys - Manage ad-hoc qualitative/quantitative research projects such as proposition development, visual identity and customer experience mapping. - Be involved in the wider user research community (outside of HMRC and the government) identifying good practices we can adopt and sharing our experiences. - Share knowledge of tools and techniques with technical and non-technical team members Skills & Technologies: - Skill with and knowledge of requirements capture methods and techniques, business systems and analysis, front end process, software development life cycles and associated processes - Methodology, proficient in the use of requirements capturing methodology, like Waterfall or RUP toolset - Able to use Data modelling techniques - Experience with the Windows Suite and MS Office applications - Proven experience of using a variety of usability testing methodologies to reveal actionable customer insights and gather user needs for web based services - Proven experience of creating research strategies/approaches - Proven experience of managing, executing and analysing usability test sessions, and facilitating workshops - Excellent analytical and problem solving skills, and the ability to quickly develop recommendations based on quantitative and qualitative evidence - Confident in explaining user needs to senior civil servants and acting as a persuasive advocate for those needs both within the team and the department at large - Extensive knowledge of human factors, ethnography, and the user-centred design process for product and service design in an iterative development environment - Demonstrable knowledge, experience in and passion for user centred design practices - Proven experience of audience modelling and developing design personas - Experience across web content, tools and transactional services, especially those with complex user journeys (involving development of a logical sequence of steps to complete transactions) - Comfortable working with data, from gathering and analysis through to design and presentation - Comfortable in the capacity of mentor for other user researcher(s) This job was originally posted as www.totaljobs.com/job/89799321