Senior User Experience Researcher

Your opportunity

At Schwab, you’re empowered to make an impact on your career. Here, innovative thought meets creative problem solving, helping us challenge the status quo and transform the finance industry together.

We are looking for an experienced, collaborative, and adaptable senior researcher who is passionate about understanding user needs and pain points to join the Retail User Experience Research Team. The UX team crafts mobile and desktop experiences that are grounded in empathy and informed by insights and thoughtful planning. We are a multi-disciplinary group of professionals with expertise in Design, Content Strategy and Research. We collaborate across the enterprise to build exceptional digital experiences for millions of clients. Our clients are passionate about the tools and experiences we provide, and we create experiences that inspire trust, simplify the complex, demystify investing, and empower our clients to truly own their tomorrow.​

As a Senior UX Researcher, you are responsible for:

Research expertise and execution:

• Apply core user research methods across product delivery phases, research question types, and data types for complex projects.
• Apply lean user research principles, scoping research questions and applying the right level of rigor to deliver quality findings within existing constraints for complex projects.
• Engage partners in the end-to-end research process, setting expectations and maximizing opportunities for involvement, including identifying needs, defining research questions, and collecting requirements.
• Comfortably lead research sessions with Schwab clients and financial advisors, handling challenges with participants with ease and professionalism.
• Facilitate group activities to collect insights, generate ideas, and build research alignment.
• Translate data into actionable insights and clearly communicate research findings, tailoring presentations to the forum and audience including senior leadership.
• Use research constraints as opportunities for creative solutioning, proposing alternative or mixed methods to meet project needs, and adapting textbook research methodologies and techniques to the context at hand.
• Craft compelling narratives and lead activities to communicate the value and impact of user research.
• Evolve or introduce new approaches and initiatives to grow the research maturity of the broader org.

Team leadership:

• Lead projects across UXXD disciplines to create seamless experiences.
• Work with others on team to estimate project completion based on task completion estimates resource availability.
• Foresee potential roadblocks and raise to project leads.

Experience consulting:

• Create solutions together with a cross-functional Agile team, considering how digital, physical, and service channels work together.
• Facilitate ideation efforts with a focus on the problem to solve, creating a conversation of “how might we”.
• Drive decision-making with the understanding that great products are achieved iteratively.
• Raise potential roadblocks to team or project leads and proactively seek solutions.
• Maintain the high standards set by the group, including channel standards, content standards and the Charles Schwab design system.

Teamwork, collaboration and engagement:

• Passionate about team, our mission and the needs of our partners and users.
• Partner across discipline and function.
• Build relationships by creating trust with partners through setting expectations on process/deliverables.
• Actively seek and use ideas and feedback to strategically guide delivery.
• Make others feel comfortable by conveying interest in their feedback/viewpoint, anticipating reactions and responding attentively to their ideas and concerns.
• Raise hand to help others and proactively take time to work with teammates to support/guide activities or craft.

Your approach:

• See the best in others and situations and inspire teammates to do the same.
• Use various communication techniques to showcase work and persuade through rationale and storytelling.
• Propose solutions that benefit all parties and craft arguments to support position.
• Have a design position but is not rigidly fixed when presented with new information.
• Work within an undefined space to define potential paths forward through problem definition and design thinking.
• Recognize challenges are part of the process and work through whys to determine next steps and new directions.

Why your work matters:

• You will support an engaged set of users who rely on our products to manage their financial lives.
• By understanding user needs you will be able to impact how our users do business with Schwab.
• You will learn how to balance functionality against complexity on a highly visible platform which serves millions of advisors and retail customers.
• You will work with an engaged design team that fosters a learning environment.

What you have

• 6 + years of user research experience focused on digital products or equivalent.
• 1+ year of user research experience for touch-based mobile interfaces is a plus.
• 1-2 years' experience researching financial investment products.
• 6 months of direct Schwab experience as a current or recent contractor or employee
• Experience with interviewing high-net worth clients is a plus.
• Experience with UX measures and metrics, design heuristics, usability principles, and user research best practices.
• Experience working in a collaborative, multi-disciplinary team within an iterative process and an Agile development methodology.
• Strong self-management skills, comfortable with substantial responsibility, working directly with our client partners, and capable of managing your project schedules.
• Experience with user research software and data analysis tools, prototyping and project management platforms.
• Effective relationship building skills--ability to partner cross-functionally, cross-enterprise and work effectively across peers and leaders as well as various personality types.
• Comfortable in a project-driven work environment, with a positive attitude and solid work ethic.

While the above skills and experience are desired, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every requirement. Your background and abilities may still be a great asset to our team, and we welcome the opportunity to hear why you might be a good fit!

Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer committed to diversifying its workforce. It is Schwab's policy to provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, or related medical conditions), gender identity or expression, national origin, ancestry, age, disability, legally protected medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, military status, citizenship status or any other status that is protected by law.