Sr Manager, 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 Believe in the importance of in-office collaboration and fully intend for the selected candidate for this role to work on site in the specified location(s).

Our business is driven by looking through our clients’ eyes, which makes it a dream place to work as a user experience researcher. Our company motto supports user advocacy. Our purpose is designing tools and experiences that enable users to achieve their financial goals. 

This individual contributor position is an expert in User Experience Research. This person operates with independent judgement and leads by example demonstrating passion, positivity, and keen problem-solving skills. 

This position is responsible for:

Research Consulting

• Set expectations with the project teams and prioritize activities
• Create and maintain research schedules
• Communicate status and agreements with project team
• Review work with UX managers, keep them updated on project status and escalate items appropriately

Teamwork, Collaboration and Engagement

• Works well with all partners to deliver work
• Support UX team members
• Strategically listen to feedback and help guide the delivery

Collaborative and cooperative

• Has a research position but is not rigidly fixed when given new information
• Passionate about team, our mission and the needs of our partners and users
• Enthusiastic about UX design

Empathy & Curiosity

• Understands and advocates user needs, walking in their shoes when possible
• Focus on innovation and improvement
• Regularly learns more about design theory, practice, and tools

Why your work matters:

• You will support an engaged set of users who rely on our products to manage their clients’ financial lives
• By researching and understanding the user needs you will be able to impact how our users do business with Schwab
• You will learn how 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’ll do:

• Work with diverse stakeholders to develop research plans that include both foundational and iterative testing
• Conduct research, deploying a variety of methodologies
• Create or apply data-driven personas
• Deliver actionable recommendations
• Instill best practices for research, provide guidance on how to meet usability requirements, and deliver high-quality work on tight schedules
• Keep up to date with current UX research trends, tools and technology
• Serve as an evangelist for user research and the benefit it provides to our cleints

What you have

Required Qualifications:

• 10+ years of UX research experience
• Deliverables change on a project-by-project basis, but may include elements such as user interviews, task analyses, journey maps, personas, and usability testing
• Expertise in synthesizing research data
• Strong communicator and storyteller
• Experience working in collaborative, geographically distributed software development environments on large, complex desktop web, mobile web, and mobile applications
• Comfort in a project-oriented work environment, with a positive attitude and solid work ethic
• Strong self-management skills, comfortable with substantial responsibility, working directly with our client partners, and capable of managing your project schedules
• Ability to manage multiple projects at one time with attention to detail and deliver expected documents/recommendations on time
• Effective relationship builder: ability to partner cross-functionally, cross-enterprise and work effectively with various levels of the organization as well as various personality types
• Proficiency with Mac OS X and/or Windows office productivity software; hands-on experience with some of following software would be helpful but can be trained: SharePoint and MS office suite, UserZoom/UserTesting, or Alida
• Prior experience within financial services industry

Preferred Qualifications:

• Advanced degree in applied psychology, experimental psychology, human factors psychology or engineering, human computer interaction, anthropology, sociology, or similar people-science-related discipline
• Preferred experience with financial services, systems / design for internal users, and new product launches
• Experience with Schwab rep research and understanding of the structure, and bonus for doing research with the Services team

In addition to the salary range, this role is also eligible for bonus or incentive opportunities.