Position Summary

Our New York office is looking for a Human Factors Specialist. The role involves collaborating with interdisciplinary teams and with our clients to create innovative products, services, spaces, interactions and experiences.

Human Factors researchers play a key role in the IDEO process by leading the team through the user research, which uncovers the insights that both inform and inspire design and innovation. We are looking for a naturally empathetic, passionate and entrepreneurial person, who has 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 bringing this passion to life for the internal design team, and client organization. In addition to being empathetic, creative, and a systems thinker, here are some of the qualities we’re searching for:

• Passionately curious – We want people who are excited to be in the field and as inquisitive about other people and their stories as they are empathetic.

• Captivatingly articulate – We want compelling storytellers who can get people out of their seats and bring tears to their eyes.

• Provocatively thoughtful – We want people who can challenge conventions and inspire teams and clients to translate keen observations into compelling ideas.

Key Activities

Specific responsibilities:

• Fully engaged in conducting the research. Specialists must be prepared to plan and lead user research in order to discover insights about people first hand.

• Structure user-centered research and work with internal and client teams through fieldwork to determine users; physical, cognitive, social, emotional, and cultural needs. Research specialists must have proven experience in uncovering unmet user needs, and unpacking meaning from sometimes obscure and disparate findings and framing these insights in a way that inspires design teams to develop imaginative and appropriate solutions.

• Help to facilitate teams and clients through analysis and synthesis of user research, helping to distill the most important insights and link them together in frameworks, principles, and implications for design. Design research specialists must be confident about leading teams and often clients through a range of research analysis and synthesis processes.

• Communicate design insights and opportunities throughout all phases of design. This includes delivering a quick but compelling inspiration to helping distill the most important insights and linking them together in frameworks or principles that inspire design.

• Compelling storytelling: A critical element of this role is to deliver insights about people and behavior - verbally and visually - in a way that generates empathy, emotion, and engagement from the client and design team.

Additional Skills Required

We are looking for practice-oriented candidates with at least 2 years experience in consulting, design agency or market facing organization and experience in design research methodologies including: research planning, field work methods (including interviews and observation), online research methods (for example online panels and communities) and synthesis to create generative design opportunities.

We are specifically interested to hear from people who have passion and experience in the area of:

• Brand positioning and marketing strategy

• Observing and understanding the digital space

• Behavior change

• Bridging qualitative to quantitative research

Please submit, in addition to your resume, examples of your work. Please do not upload text only versions of your work. It is helpful to see how you communicate with design teams. For example, please send: A portfolio description of a project in which you had the chance to develop your field-based discoveries to the point of design outcomes or actionable design principles.

or

If you don’t have an example, please provide a 1 page with answers to the following questions:

• What methods/techniques/philosophies do you bring with you that will help to develop our process and thinking?

• How might you differ from anyone else who’s applying for this position?

• Tell us a story about how or where you've found inspiration and what you then did with it.

Helpful Tips

The Online Application Process:

• Please submit your cover letter, resume, portfolio and/or additional materials as a “Resume Attachment” in the resume attachment section which is located in the Career Center of your application page.
• Attachments must be formatted as an Adobe "text based" PDF, PowerPoint, or Word document.
• If you skip the cover letter section at the start of the application form, please attach your cover letter as a resume attachment per the instructions above.
• Create a profile at OpenIDEO.com to explore how we work and for us to get to you know you better. You'll find a space in the IDEO application form to enter your OpenIDEO username.
• Additional tips can be found in our Careers FAQ.

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.