handbook/handbook-main/roles/mid_user_researcher.txt

# User Researcher

- Location: mainly remote with occasional office and client visits
- Offices: London, Bristol, Manchester, and Swansea
- Salary: Please refer to job advert when this role is live
- SFIA: Level 3

## Summary

Made Tech wants to positively impact the country's future by using technology to improve society. We believe being design-led can create positive outcomes in the public sector through critical services enabled by technology. We’ve built a community of designers and researchers to support the public sector's growing demand for a design-led approach to service delivery.

User researchers are experienced practitioners who collaborate with others to understand challenges people and society face. They work within a team to inform the design and deliver public services. They do this by leading user research with real people, ensuring what their team is learning in research informs the end-to-end design of a chosen service.

## Key responsibilities

## Scope

- Responsible to a senior user researcher for successfully informing the design and delivery of good public services
- Hands-on research for one product/team
- Acts as the research subject matter expert on a product team, facilitating the design process and communicating research decisions to the team and stakeholders
- Expected to find out potential problems, shape them, and conduct solutions
- Recognises when to ask for further guidance and support
- Work is reviewed with the occasional need for direction or implementation changes
- Contributes to communities of practice, discussing and sharing suggestions, approaches and ideas - including proactively seeking feedback on own work

## Practice

- Plan research that informs the design of public services, so they’re useful, usable and create successful outcomes
- Do research with people that makes them comfortable sharing details of their lives, that teams must understand to design good services
- Analyse and interpret raw research into findings so that teams can confidently confirm or challenge their understandings of problems and ideas
- Has experience and interest in user centred, lean and agile research methodologies including:
  - Usability testing 
  - Contextual enquiry
  - Rapid research
- Understands and applies research ethics and GDPR

## Contributing to teams

- Involve whole teams in user research to build their understanding and empathy for people using and running public services
- Assure the quality of decisions within their team with support from research community
- Introduce good habits for sharing and improving design work into teams

## Community

- Take part occasionally in the hiring of designers and researchers
- Help define Made Tech design principles through delivering good public services
- Contribute to a design studio culture at Made Tech and client offices

## Key measures

- Delivery of good public services for users with clients

## Competencies

- Client focus
- Drive to deliver
- Learning and mentoring
- Experienced in their profession
- Facilitation

## Work perks and benefits

Take a look at the Benefits & Perks section of the [Made Tech Handbook](https://github.com/madetech/handbook) to see what we can offer you. 

We practice salary transparency when it comes to advertising roles at Made Tech. Every role we publish will include the salary range in the job ad, please do refer to that.

For any internal candidates, we are currently reviewing and refreshing our pay bands and will be sharing those internally first. They will then be placed back here again by the end of July 2025.

## Applying

When we’re hiring for this role, you can see the details and apply at www.madetech.com/careers. If you have any questions about the role please email us at [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]). We’re happy to help!