SMS Assist's vision is to make every property better. We serve more than 200,000 commercial and residential properties nationwide. We connect property owners in industries like retail and restaurant with a dense affiliate network that specializes in more than 55 trades like landscaping, plumbing, HVAC, and more. Our customer service organization leverages our proprietary One by SMS Assist cloud platform to process thousands of work orders on a daily basis.
Every day we strive to provide the best service to our customers through an entrepreneurial spirit, a passion for service, teamwork, and integrity. We offer a game room, fitness center, bike garage, SMS Serves philanthropy program, company events, a fun location along Chicago's Magnificent Mile, and more. SMS Assist is a Moxie Awards winner, Chicago Innovation Awards winner, a Top 100 Digital Company in Chicago and has been named to the Forbes Cloud 100 list for all four years of its existence! The list ranks the top 100 private cloud companies across four factors: market leadership, estimated valuation, operating metrics, and culture.
Summary
The Senior User Researcher supports the Product organization in all aspects of research including planning, recruiting, moderation, analysis and reporting for both generative and evaluative research. This role works closely with the UX team, SMS business leadership, product managers, engineers, and our users to help our organization demonstrate that our products are truly relevant to users, are easy-to-use, and delivering value. The Senior User Researcher has experience delivering research value on multiple products, proactively managing deliverables and expectations. They share their expertise with product teams to help enhance our organization's research capabilities through leadership, mentorship and training. As a core member of our design team, a Senior User Researcher is expected to collaborate with UX architects, UI designers, product managers, developers and stakeholders to contribute to the definition and creation of human-centered products that address customer needs and marry them with business goals.
The User Interface Designer I demonstrates expertise in these areas of UX discipline:

• User Research
• Value Testing
• Usability Testing
• Ideation / Brainstorming

Responsibilities

• Planning, designing and conducting the value and usability testing process from developing user recruitment through to test moderation, analysis and reporting
• Leading and enhancing our user research methods to support gathering insights for new product and concept developments including user requirements, early-stage concept testing, prototype testing, and creating surveys.
• Creating and maintaining a repository of user research insights to accelerate empathy building, insight gathering and onboarding collaborators. Documenting insights gained from user research into formats to enhance organizational understanding of our users - such as personas and user journey maps. Collaborating with product managers and designers to devise appropriate research strategies to generate focused insights and to convert concepts into high quality stimulus material
• Provide direction and expertise to designers, product managers and developers to help turn user data into actionable product/service requirements that feed into prototype development, and influence product direction
• Applying knowledge in human factors and the human-centered design process to product and service design in an iterative development environment
• Presenting findings and related design/business recommendations and customer insights to senior decision makers
• Demonstrating the value of human-centered design principles and research driven insights and best practice across the organization
• Foster a healthy team environment
• Work with team members across time zones
• Ensure confidentiality of internal and external data
• Perform ad-hoc projects and other duties as assigned

Professional Skills
These are the professional skills we would expect from an individual fully established in this role.

• Verbal Communication - Advanced
• Written Communication - Proficient
• Teamwork - Proficient
• Relationships - Proficient
• Negotiation - Proficient
• Organizational Awareness - Advanced
• Learning Agility - Advanced
• Analysis - Advanced
• Problem Solving - Advanced
• Process Orientation - Proficient
• Prioritization - Advanced

Role Specific Skills

• Able to share expertise in human-centered design principals + techniques related to research
• Able to articulate user needs to senior stakeholders and act as a persuasive advocate for those needs
• Experience designing and leading user research and usability testing, analyzing results and assisting scrum teams in prioritizing actions
• Experience analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data to produce UX artifacts
• Ability to story tell and frame problems for a diverse audience of stakeholders, helping them visualize design opportunities
• A love for user experience design and understanding of its value

People Management Skills

• Not applicable to this role

Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent work experience
• 5+ years of experience working in the field of user research
• Experience working in an agile product development organization
• Experience working with product / engineering teams

Other Relevant Qualifications
Please note, this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities and activities, and schedule may change at any time with or without notice.
SMS Assist is an Equal Opportunity Employer (EOE) that welcomes and encourages all applicants to apply regardless of age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identify and/or expression, national origin, disability, veteran status, marital or parental status, ancestry, citizenship status, pregnancy or other reasons prohibited by law.