Position Summary

Our San Francisco and Palo Alto offices are looking for experienced Design Researchers. This role involves working collaboratively with interdisciplinary teams and with our clients to create innovative products, services, spaces, interactions and experiences. Design Researchers play a key role in the IDEO process by leading the team through user research, which uncovers the insights that inform and inspire design and innovation.

We would like to hear from Design Researchers with proven skills discovering, interpreting and communicating design insights and opportunities, and in contributing to all phases of design. You must have 3‐5+ years of relevant work experience.

Key Activities

In particular, we are looking for...

Empathy and Passion for people ‐ We look for those who have a natural skill to engage with people at a deep level. You should be passionate about representing a human and humane perspective and should have skills in fostering this passion within the team and the client team.

User research/fieldwork experience ‐ Design research team members must be prepared to plan and lead qualitative design research to discover insights first hand. We are looking for people who can keep up a high degree of rigor throughout. We are looking for a balance of deep understanding in process and methodology, with the ability to move quickly and nimbly without being hindered by convention. Examples of innovative and experimental approaches and methods are key. Numerous examples of contextual inquiries and other qualitative methods leveraged across various domains are integral.

Comfort with ambiguity – Design Researchers need to be comfortable working with ambiguity. Being able to work with ambiguous scopes, and articulate informed intuition in a compelling manner are key. Design research at IDEO demands comfort delivering a range from quick but compelling inspiration to comprehensive research and frameworks that inform an actionable strategy. The ability to help shape the earliest prototypes for evaluation and to structure user feedback sessions with foggy inputs is a plus.

Flexible and efficient ‐ Our projects are fast‐paced, and the Design Researcher should be comfortable exercising a balance between design and inspiration bias with academic research rigor, in order to move quickly from research planning, to conducting the field work, to synthesizing insights to recommending design directions and opportunities. It is important to remain confident with flexible schedules and tight deadlines.

Deep Insights that connect to design ‐ Design Researchers must have the ability to identify and articulate deep insights with the team and with the client, to understand latent needs and to unpack meaning from sometimes obscure and disparate findings. The insights and information drawn from research must be translated into an inspirational and useful foundation for design. IDEO researchers must delight in cross‐disciplinary collaboration to generate compelling opportunities and concepts.

Ability to lead synthesis ‐ Design researchers must be able to lead the team and often the clients through the analysis and synthesis processes, helping to distill the most important insights and linking them together in frameworks or principles for design. The ability to abstract deeper patterns of meaning from the various early‐phase inputs, and to make the abstract actionable for further development, is critical.

Range of tactical implementation to strategic perspective - In the variety of work that we do, our questions may inform the UI or packaging interaction, an internal organizational culture or brand direction. Our projects involve design researchers in both strategic thinking and tactical implementation challenges based upon the insights gathered from the field.

Captivating communication and storytelling – A critical element of this role is to deliver insights – verbally and visually ‐ in a way that generates empathy, emotion, and engagement from the client and design team. A repertoire of storytelling mediums is a plus, such as video ethnography, visual photo-documentation, and multi‐media presentation techniques.

Collaboration and consultmanship – Design researchers work on small multi-disciplinary teams with a heavy level of collaboration. All our positions are client-facing, so we are looking for people with both client facilitation experience and multi-disciplinary collaboration experience. Professionalism, and an interest in engaging clients and other team members throughout the research activities and findings is key.

Designers coming to research and researchers coming to design ‐ We are open to people who have an academic background in design but who have moved through their experiences into the world of research. We are also open to researchers (sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, etc.) who have made their way to the world of design. We are seeking a high level of research rigor that you can articulate with confidence to the insight, marketing and R&D teams on the client‐side, as well as the layman designers and engineers on your internal team.

Additional Skills Required

We are looking for people with a diverse array of interests, subject familiarity and expertise. Some specific areas of passion and deep experience that would be helpful are:

• Brand strategy: Conducting research to inform and inspire brand strategy and service experiences.

• Digital: Leveraging digital tools to extend our insight process. We are passionate about augmenting our in‐depth fieldwork with online technologies. Experience in conducting research via online communities, crowd sourcing, social networking sites, mobile platforms or digital video/photo journals and leveraging other digital research tools and channels is beneficial.

• Large scale social systems: Conducting research to inform and inspire strategy and solutions in complex social systems, organizations, large subcultures, or communities. This may include work in the public sector, education system, etc.

• Hybrid (Qual and quant research): Our approach is mainly qualitative, but we often complement with quantitative approaches, internally and with our clients. We are interested in people who can respect both and bring quantitative experience to the table. We look for people who are very experimental and open in their approach.

• Health/Medical: We are interested in people who have experience leveraging empathy techniques and conducting human-centered research in deep technical and complex medical contexts, and practicing sensitivity to privacy and health compliance needs.

This position is based in Palo Alto or San Francisco, however projects may be based in either location. This position also entails frequent travel.

In addition to your resume, please send us examples of your work. Please do not send text only versions of your work. It is helpful to show a breadth of process: methods, research tools, diversity of contexts, insights generated, frameworks and strategies inspired, output developed and challenges encountered. Please send a portfolio of your work that demonstrates the above abilities OR a description of a few projects in which you had the chance to develop your field‐based discoveries to the point of design outcomes or to inform actionable design opportunities. It helps us see a wide range of work that you have been involved in.

Helpful Tips

The Online Application Process:

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Equal Opportunity Employer:
IDEO is an equal opportunity employer; applicants are considered for all roles without regard to race, color, religious creed, sex, national origin, citizenship status, age, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, marital, parental, veteran or military status, unfavorable military discharge, or any other status protected by applicable federal, state or local law.