Lead User Researcher
Purpose of the role
In this role, you will positively impact our titles by providing actionable insights that will help shape our games throughout the development process. You will work closely with the development teams to plan and execute research, test concepts, run playtests, and transform data into meaningful insights about user perceptions, sentiment, and actions. You'll create persuasive reports and visualisations to demonstrate opportunities to improve the player experience.
Frontier’s User Research team is a new and growing team, and we’re looking for an individual who is motivated by the challenge of helping to improve, grow, and lead the team going forward. We’re very keen to expand upon our existing UR services for both our internally developed and externally developed Frontier Foundry projects, and the successful candidate will work across a variety of game genres and with external and internal teams.
This position will require strong quantitative research and visualisation skills, in addition to qualitative skills. You will partner with various teams across Frontier to tackle a wide range of research objectives. Be prepared to evangelise UR, collaborating with your fellow researchers, producers, and designers. If you’re an advocate for excellent player experiences, passionate about gaming, you may be the ideal candidate to lead Frontier’s User Research team!
Key responsibilities
- Collaborate with game development teams to identify research opportunities and create comprehensive research plans to inform the team’s decisions, on time and on budget
- Own the research process by designing and conducting research studies using a variety of research methods – including but not limited to surveys, focus groups, usability testing, playtesting, expert analysis etc to effectively embed user feedback and player-centric design philosophy into their development processes
- Choose and define appropriate metrics that reflect the quality of user experience as well as the impact of design changes and meaningful, impactful insights about players
- Effectively communicate methodologies and results through powerful visualizations and concise reports, focusing on actionable recommendations
- Spearhead initiatives to craft new and evolve existing research methods and processes by staying up-to-date with innovations in the industry. Explore new tools and process improvements to constantly improve how the User Research team functions and delivers value, including applying continuous improvement of yourself through training, writing, and evaluating video game UX
- Help promote a culture of research with the wider development team
- Act as a coach and mentor, as well as leading other researchers toward innovative and creative thinking when approaching research challenges.
About you
- Previous demonstrable experience working in User Research within games
- A degree in Human Factors, Human Computer Interaction, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, or other related field
- Strong influencing skills, with ability to convince stakeholders of the merits of your proposals
- A robust understanding of industry-standard methods including ethnographic methods (e.g. in-depth interview, group interviews), evaluative methods (e.g. concept testing, in-lab/remote usability testing, tree testing, etc.), and quantitative methods (surveys, behavioural analytics, etc.) and best practices to craft actionable and unbiased recommendations.
- Good negotiation and communication skills, able to work well with cross-functional teams – e.g. game designers, producers, marketing etc
- Curious and creative; enjoy complex issues and problem solving
Desirable
- Experience with creating a User Research team from the ground up
- A postgraduate (Masters or PhD) degree in Human Factors, Human Computer Interaction, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, or related field
- Ability to demonstrate evidence of UR contributions on a shipped title
- Good understanding of statistics and analytics.