Design Research III

Description
Yahoo! Personals Design Researcher

Yahoo! Inc. is seeking an experienced Design Researcher to join the User Experience & Design (UED) team for Yahoo! Personals. Yahoo! Personals is one of the world's largest and most popular online dating services and holds a significant place in Yahoo!'s portfolio of products and services. The User Experience & Design Team mission is to define and design the user experience for Yahoo! Personals, recently ranked as the #1 user experience in the online dating industry.

Primary Function:
You will be responsible for planning, designing, and conducting a variety of design research projects to generate actionable recommendations that will maintain Yahoo! Personals' dominant industry position and extend its market leadership by defining the next generation of online dating. You will collaborate closely with the Personals UED Team that consists of talented interaction designers and visual designers who work in a highly collaborative environment with one another and their cross-functional counterparts. Your research will be vital to defining the Yahoo! Personals user experience strategy, spearheading a user-centered design process, and developing the most useful, usable, and delightful online dating experience in the world.

URL: http://personals.yahoo.com

Primary Responsibilities:
* Plan, design, and conduct high quality design research throughout the product development process, including ethnographies, diary studies, competitive evaluations, iterative prototype studies, participatory design sessions, usability studies, benchmark studies, and similar methods.
* Foster collaboration with designers, and product managers to convert user insights into actionable strategic and tactical recommendations that inform product strategy and design.
* Collaborate with other design researchers and research organizations within Yahoo! (market research and site analytics) to create comprehensive and coordinated research strategies.
* Collaborate with product and marketing managers to understand business needs and design appropriate research strategies to generate focused insights.
* Advocate for the end user by building consensus with designers and stakeholders to ensure that design and business goals are balanced with user needs.

Qualifications:
* Demonstrated success translating design research results into actionable recommendations that have a significant impact on product strategy and design.
* Demonstrated success at developing creative and comprehensive research strategies to reveal unforeseen opportunities and issues that have a significant impact on product strategy and design.
* Demonstrated experience presenting research data in unique and innovative ways, such as affinity diagrams, personas, narrative storyboards, work models, workshops, and role-playing.
* Extremely strong communication skills. Must be able to communicate clearly and effectively to varying audiences, verbally and in writing, in small and large forums, and at all levels of an organization.
* At least 3 years experience leading design research activities, including ethnography, contextual inquiry, prototype/usability testing, benchmark testing, competitive evaluations, and survey design within a product development organization or in support of a large website.
* Experience researching user needs throughout the complete product development cycle of successfully launched consumer web and/or software applications.
* Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD degree in Anthropology, Cognitive or Experimental Psychology, Cognitive Science, Human Factors, Human-Computer Interaction, or related area.
* Formal training in negotiation or facilitation techniques a plus.

Yahoo! Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. For more information or to search all of our openings, please visit http://careers.yahoo.com.