User Experience Tester/Researcher

Position Summary:

As the UX Researcher/Tester for DSGa, you will be working closely with the DSGa team’s Senior UI Designer to research best practices, enhance through design iteration, and conduct usability tests for the state’s enterprise Drupal platform. As part of the DSGa team dedicated to problem-first solutions development, you will need to understand the functionality and offerings of the platform, and use that knowledge to test current and future solutions for state customers.

 

The UX Researcher/Tester will need to study user behavior and patterns, and meet with customers to understand business goals, review web analytics, write documentation, and write usability test scenarios. You will be our user expert and champion on how the system should work for our end users, keeping an eye on what is being developed and ensuring that it is on target and easy to use by the targeted end users.

 

The best candidate is someone with experience in Drupal, and a passion for researching, testing, and designing user-focused solutions based on business problems. You should keep yourself updated with industry trends and best practices and translate that to how we as a state can lead by example within the realm of web solutions. You are a team player, and enjoy working closely with others to report, research, and explore solutions to challenges.

 

Responsibilities Include:

  • Lead the UX Researcher/Tester role across all DSGa teams.
  • Be an active participant in planning and conducting content migrations for websites migrated from legacy systems to the new digital platform.
  • Collaborate with the platform team to design innovative, user-centric product solutions that satisfy our end users and meet agency business goals.
  • Conduct training for agency content managers using DSGa’s UX training materials and framework.
  • Champion design-thinking. Your work should foster a culture of design innovation and raise awareness of design methods.
  • Provide customer-focused leadership by working closely with the business, product, and technical teams to develop product strategy, use cases, and high-level requirements.
  • Set a high bar for DSGa customer experience. Build the right standards and processes to ensure that anything that ships meets a consistent high bar for brand, design, copy, and overall UX.
  • Develop and build relationships across teams and disciplines within DSGa to promote collaboration and efficiency.
  • Ensure our cross-platform web, mobile, and conversational user experiences support customer needs as well and drive towards measurable business goals.
  • Use market analyses and customer research findings to drive design decisions and reduce ambiguity.
  • Collaborate effectively with multi-disciplinary vendor teams to evaluate the feasibility of proposed designs and champion effective UX in the face of technical constraints.
  • Participate in customer requirements gathering and discovery meetings. Support the acquisition team in presenting design work to stakeholders and executive leadership and gain buy in on proposed approach.
  • Be deeply familiar with DSGa goals and product roadmap.
  • Participate in content migrations for future sites to ensure sites adopt appropriate content models and types to be effective.
  • Participate in internal and external projects as needed.
  • Interact with agency stakeholders to gain buy in and understand user best practices.
  • As needed conduct testing, writing test scripts, and synthesize reports.


 

Required Skills / Experience:

The ideal candidate must be self-motivated with a proven track record in customer requirements gathering and documentation. Candidate must be organized and analytical, adept at working in a team environment, able to design and implement a project schedule, and able to handle multiple priorities in a fast moving environment.
 

  • 5+ years of experience as a User Experience Researcher/Tester, interaction designer, information architect, or similar.
  • Knowledge of web-based content management systems, background with Drupal 7 and 8 preferred.
  • Knowledgeable in user-first design methodologies, and able to speak to best practices in UX and UI.
  • Ability to collect, evaluate, and present data and information from multiple sources, resolve conflicts and differentiate between user goals and agency goals.
  • Deliver results after thorough user research by collaborating and communicating with customers and site users.
  • Experience closely collaborating with technical teams.
  • Ability to communicate effectively in writing at a technical level as well as non-technical level.
  • Familiarity with technical aspects of UX across iOS, Android, mobile and desktop web platforms.
  • Experience managing expectations when balancing alternatives against business and financial constraints.
  • Familiarity with Agile (Scrum) project methodologies.
  • Excellent communication, interpersonal, and analytical skills including the ability to present design concepts clearly and persuasively to colleagues, partners, stakeholders, and especially to senior executives.
  • A portfolio demonstrating your ability to research and design.

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Design, Information Sciences, HCI, Psychology or equivalent combination of education and experience.
  • 5+ years of experience conducting UX analysis for Web CMS applications which leverage emergent technologies, consumer electronics and/or mobile devices.
  • Strong conceptualization ability, strong visual communication ability, drawing skills preferred.
  • Familiarity with JIRA or similar product management tools.
  • Ability to create wireframes and a strong working knowledge of prototyping tools.
  • Experience with Design Systems, user interface design patterns and best practice.
  • Experience conducting usability tests, card sorts, field studies, survey analysis, and journey map analysis.
  • Understanding of common software project management and development practices.
  • Previous experience designing for government is highly desired.