Senior Inclusive Design Researcher
Who we are
Realtor.com is your one stop shop for homebuyers, sellers, renters, and dreamers, with comprehensive for-sale listings, insightful information, valuable tools, and professional expertise. We're excited and hungry to make a difference to the millions of people in the US who buy a home each year. Our aspiration starts with treating our home buyer as our focal point - we believe that delivering on experiences that truly help people through this seemingly difficult life event will lead us to continued and greater success as a company.
Summary
At Realtor.com we believe that everyone deserves a safe place to call home.
To achieve our vision we’re building the Inclusive Design and Accessibility program. We need designers, researchers, content designers, and accessibility specialists who are passionate about creating meaningful experiences that are usable by everyone. This goal is big, but essential to our mission and our core values.
The Inclusive Design team builds and delivers customer-centered services, tools, guidelines, and processes from concept through implementation that ensure our product teams empathize with, understand, and ethically meet the unique needs of our underserved consumer audience, and support our customer service representatives.
Role
As a Senior Inclusive Design Researcher on the Inclusive Design and Accessibility team, you’ll have a love for, and experience with, exploratory and usability user research methodologies. Our team develops solutions by immersing ourselves in our consumers' lives to better understand their daily barriers to access; discrimination, physical, cognitive or emotional disability, socio-economic status, and more. Compassion, empathy, and a willingness to learn will be key to your success in this role.
You’ll help develop guidelines and best practices, facilitate workshops, provide guidance to design teams, and support the team with the creation of human-centered design methods and education materials for inclusive research.
You’ll also collaborate with your team to conduct research that may include methods such as interviews, field studies, or diary studies. This role involves regularly engaging with people with disabilities; you will set a high bar of respect and compassion, able to adjust activities and/or processes to best meet the needs of our participants.
This role reports to the Senior Director of Product Design, Inclusive Design and Accessibility.
Qualifications
- 5+ years working in design industry
- 3+ years of hands-on experience designing and conducting research (in-person and remote) and be able to show how your work has had an impact on product roadmaps and/or informed design decisions
- Experience with a variety of qualitative research techniques, along with the knowledge of when and why to apply them
- Have created effective ways of sharing your insights so they resonate and are impactful
- Experience crafting your own research questions, research objectives, interview guides
- Comfortable working with data. Examples include gathering data, analyzing data, creating research readouts, and curating research.
- Experience creating behavioral archetypes, behavioral segments, spectrum personas, and user journey maps
- Experience with facilitation (such as workshops and training)
- Experience in UX Design, hierarchy of information, and storytelling
- Strong and clear communication skills
- Informed and strong opinions, loosely held
- A practitioner of user-centric processes and design thinking principles
- Exemplifies a “We, Not Me attitude”
Responsibilities
- Conduct end-to-end research using a mix of methodologies to help us gain confidence in our understanding of consumers (current and future) who may experience barriers to finding, selling, or renting a home, their needs, and the opportunity this uncovers for our products
- Conduct end-to-end research using a mix of methodologies with our Customer Relations Service teams to help us gain confidence in our understanding of their unique needs and what barriers they might face in conducting their daily jobs, and the opportunity this uncovers for our internal product and services
- Influence product roadmaps through data and research
- Synthesize research data, create research readouts, create spectrum personas, behavioral archetypes, and behavioral segmentation for the design and product teams to utilize in their lines of business
- Help create training materials, guidelines, and best practices for designers and non-designers on inclusive design and accessibility research
- Facilitate training workshops for designers and non-designers on inclusive design and accessibility research
At realtor.com®, we believe that everyone deserves a home of their own. We’re a community of nearly 2,000 employees that work hard to ensure that from the moment someone starts dreaming about a new home, to the moment they walk in the door and beyond, we’re there to lend a helping hand. Every month, 70 million people trust us with their journey home by visiting our site and mobile apps, and we’d love to have you join our team to help.
We’ve got great offices across Canada and the US and lots of sweet jobs to choose from, so we’re hoping you’ll join us on our journey to make home buying and selling easier, and more rewarding for everyone.
Let’s make a difference, together. For Real.
Diversity is important to us, therefore, realtor.com is an Equal Opportunity Employer regardless of age, color, national origin, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital status, status as a disabled veteran and/or veteran of the Vietnam Era or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. In addition, realtor.com will provide reasonable accommodations for otherwise qualified disabled individuals.