Job Description

This role is on-site in Redmond, WA.

Pay: $55/hr - $65/hr

This company brings together researchers, developers, and engineers to create the future of augmented and virtual reality. The Audio Research team is focused on harnessing the power of AR and VR to make virtual sounds indistinguishable from reality and give audio superpowers to billions of people, forever transforming how we work, play, and connect. As a UX Researcher, you’ll be responsible for uncovering the user insights and feedback that guide our early research and advanced development toward experiences that are useful, usable, and desirable.

Strong candidates will demonstrate a rigorous, mixed-methods approach to UX research and have experience developing audio-related solutions. You will work with other UX researchers and multi-disciplinary hardware and software teams to push the boundaries of what is possible in the AR/VR product and research science spaces. Ultimately, your expertise and ingenuity in research must do more than contribute to knowledge – you must also be skilled at driving measurable positive impact and user experience.

Responsibilities:

• Design & conduct research to guide the development of novel audio-centric AR/VR user experiences, leveraging a range of qualitative and quantitative UX research approaches and tools such as literature reviews, user interviews, usability testing, lab-based experimentation, and surveys.
• Translate the research insights into actionable, measurable UX recommendations and drive implementation with cross-functional partners
• Work closely with partners and stakeholders to influence the development and integration of future AR/VR experiences and solutions
• Work closely with other UX researchers to help design research plans and specific studies, communicate findings with stakeholders and drive the impact of the work.
• Independently complete research, including data collection, analysis, reporting, collaborating with teams to act upon research results, and knowledge consolidation.

Minimum Qualifications:

• MS in Human Factors, Cognitive Psychology, Neuropsychology, Perceptual Psychology, or a UX-related field
• 2+ years of experience conducting applied research on consumer products involving both qualitative and quantitative methods in the industry
• 1+ years of working in cross-functional teams

Preferred Qualifications:

• PhD in Human Factors, Cognitive Psychology, Neuropsychology, Perceptual Psychology, or a UX-related field
• 2+ years of experience conducting behavioral research with audio and audio-related devices (e.g., HMDs, smart glasses, headphones, smart speakers, and more)
• Experience using psychophysical/psychoacoustic methods
• Experience with AR/VR technologies
• Strong oral and written communication skills with experience in tailoring messages to various stakeholders

What Makes This Role Interesting:

• As a mixed-methods researcher on our Audio Presence team, you play an important role in covering broad ground in ensure a high-value UX for our features in development.
• The opportunity here spans observing and prioritizing areas of improvement for the user experience of the overall feature and specific new audio components that research scientists and engineers are deploying on early-stage hardware prototypes, as well as building and executing scaled studies to further probe quantitative evaluation of UX across listeners, conversation partners, and talkers.
• Working in a research context, you’ll be working on moonshot ideas and features for product experiences, with an eye on (but without the hard/firm pressure of) product deadlines

Value Added or Experience Gained:

• Opportunity to improve an early-stage research prototype by uncovering user painpoints, benchmarking what is an ‘acceptable / low-friction' user experience, and contributing to a metrics program to track/clarify UX metrics across prototype iterations.

Surrounding Team & Key Projects:

• This UXR will be working on the Audio Presence arm of the RLR-Audio team, supporting mostly mixed-methods analysis of the user experience of an AR-focused audio feature that the RLR-Audio team is incubating.

Top 3 Must-Have Hard Skills:

• Prior experience with in-lab psychology or social psychology experiments
• Mixed-methods (qual and quant) UXR experience.
• Ability to conduct literature reviews of academic literature

Good To Have Skills:

• Enough audio and tech awareness/skills to not need handholding in explaining our context (at least one of prior audio quality evaluation experience, hearing correction/audiology exposure)

Experience Required:

• 2+ years of experience conducting applied research on consumer products involving both qualitative and quantitative methods in the industry

Degrees/Certifications Required:

• MS in Human Factors, Cognitive Psychology, Neuropsychology, Perceptual Psychology, or a UX-related field. PhD preferred.