Human Factors Specialist

Company IDEO Shanghai
URL www.ideo.com/culture/careers/
Location Shanghai, China
Contact Freda Xu at fxu@ideo.com

Job description

Representing the human perspective in design, Human Factors (HF) Specialists play a key role in the IDEO design process, working collaboratively with interdisciplinary teams and with our clients to create innovative products, services, spaces, interactions and experiences. This individual will be responsible for leading user research to uncover insights and opportunities to guide design projects. We are currently hiring an experienced researcher for a Human Factors Specialist position. Specialists will contribute to design projects, in particular lead the HF portion of the projects – such as fully facilitating teams and clients through the design process during the fieldwork, synthesis, and storytelling.

Specific responsibilities:

• Fully engaged in conducting the research.
• Structure user-centered research and work with internal and client teams through fieldwork to determine users' physical, cognitive, social, emotional, and cultural needs.
• Help to facilitate teams and clients through analysis and synthesis of user research, helping to distill the most important insights and link them together in frameworks, principles, and implications for design.
• Communicate design insights and opportunities throughout all phases of design.

Qualifications:

• Experience – 5+ years experience in the market/innovation research covering usability tests and NPD, or/and design research. We are open to those coming from various industries including software, health care, designing for children and teenagers, service design, industrial design, interaction design, brand strategy, advertising, communications design, and environmental design. We are also open to people who have a strong academic background in design but have moved into the world of research, as well as researchers (i.e. sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, etc.) who have made their way to the world of design. It will benefit your application to show how you have worked across a wide variety of domains.
• Research project management skills – 2+ years experience in a research project management capacity required at the Senior researcher level.
• Education – Bachelor's degree required, higher degrees are strongly preferred. We are open to individuals with various educational backgrounds, but we are particularly interested in those with a human or social sciences degree (such as cognitive psychology, sociology, or anthropology).
• User research/field work skills – HF Specialists must be prepared to plan and lead user research in order to discover insights about people first hand. We are looking for people experienced in human-centered, qualitative research methodologies, and who can apply a rigorous approach to the design and execution of field research in response to various client challenges. The applicant must be able to write the research plan, recruitment brief, and discussion guide.
• Empathy and passion for people – We are looking for those who have a natural skill to engage with people at a deep level. Whether observing or interviewing customers, or working with fellow team members and clients, a HF specialist should be passionate about representing the human perspective in design and should have skills in bringing this passion to life for the team.
• Deep insights – HF Specialists must have proven experience in uncovering unmet user needs, and unpacking meaning from sometimes obscure and disparate findings and framing these insights in a way that inspires design teams to develop imaginative and appropriate solutions.
• Creative/Analytical skills – HF specialists must be confident about leading teams and often clients through a range of research analysis and synthesis processes. This includes delivering a quick but compelling inspiration to helping distill the most important insights and linking them together in frameworks or principles that inspire design.
• Ability to connect insights to design – The insights and information drawn from research must be translated into an inspirational and useful foundation for design. HF Specialists must delight in cross-disciplinary collaboration to generate user-centered opportunities and concepts. The ability to help shape the earliest prototypes for evaluation and to structure user feedback sessions with foggy inputs is a plus.
• Compelling storytelling – A critical element of this role is to deliver insights about people and behavior – verbally and visually – in a way that generates empathy, emotion, and engagement from the client and design team.
• Strategic perspective (Nice to have) – In the variety of work that we do, many of our projects involve strategic thinking based upon the insights gathered from the field. Thus, business, brand, and/or strategic experience are desirable.
• Cultural fit with IDEO – Due to the organic organizational structure of IDEO, HF specialists must be able to illustrate an entrepreneurial spirit and ability to collaborate with multidisciplinary teams and develop strong relationships. Everyone at IDEO is expected to connect with peers globally to collaborate, share knowledge, and build on each others' ideas.
• Language skills – Local Chinese only, native Mandarin speaker, fluency in spoken and written English required.
• Travel requirements – Must be able to complete an initial period of training in one of our global offices. Must be willing to travel internationally at least 10% of the time. Local travel to complete field work may be up to 50%.

To apply

Please visit our website at www.ideo.com/culture/careers/ to submit your cover letter, resume or curriculum vitae, and a portfolio of your work that demonstrates your research abilities, together with a description of projects you have carried out in which you had the chance to develop your user insights into opportunities for design. We are as interested in your storytelling style as we are in your content, so please do not send text only versions of your work.