Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Usability Officer

🎯 Role Definition

This role requires an experienced Usability Officer to lead user-centered design and research initiatives that measurably improve product usability, accessibility, and business outcomes. The ideal candidate combines hands-on usability testing and research expertise with a strategic mindset to define usability standards, coach teams, and scale UX best practices across product lines. This role partners closely with Product, Design, Engineering, Analytics, and Customer Support to translate user insights into prioritized product improvements and product strategy.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior UX Designer or Senior UX Researcher with hands-on usability testing experience
Product Designer or Interaction Designer with a focus on user research
Product Manager or Service Designer with demonstrated user-centered practice

Advancement To:

Head of UX / Director of User Experience
Head of Product Design or Director of UX Research
Chief Experience Officer (CXO) or VP of Product

Lateral Moves:

UX Research Lead / Research Ops Manager
UX Strategy Consultant
Accessibility Program Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead the design and execution of rigorous usability testing programs (moderated and unmoderated) across web, mobile, and enterprise applications to identify usability issues, validate design decisions, and measure task success and time-on-task metrics.
Develop and maintain a recurring usability testing cadence, including creation of test plans, recruitment criteria, screener surveys, test scripts, and consent documentation to ensure reproducible and ethical research.
Synthesize qualitative and quantitative research findings into clear, actionable insights, evidence-backed recommendations, and prioritized usability improvements that align with product KPIs and business objectives.
Champion accessibility and inclusive design by conducting WCAG audits, accessibility testing with assistive technologies, defining remediation roadmaps, and advising on policy and compliance for digital products.
Perform heuristic evaluations and expert reviews to rapidly surface high-impact usability problems and recommend design fixes based on established usability principles.
Define, implement, and track usability and UX metrics (e.g., SUS, NPS, task success, task time, error rate, satisfaction) to measure product usability trendlines and demonstrate ROI of UX work to stakeholders.
Design and run A/B and multivariate tests in partnership with Product and Data Analytics to validate design changes and measure their effect on conversion, retention, and satisfaction.
Create and iterate on prototypes (low to high fidelity) using tools such as Figma, Sketch, Axure, or equivalent to validate interaction patterns before handoff to engineering.
Collaborate with product managers and engineers to translate usability findings into clear product requirements, acceptance criteria, and prioritized backlog items.
Develop user personas, journey maps, mental models, and experience maps to inform product strategy and ensure consistent user-centered decisions across teams.
Establish and scale UX research and usability testing processes, templates, and playbooks that enable design and product teams to run lightweight experiments and tests autonomously.
Recruit, screen, and manage participant panels and vendor relationships for usability studies, ensuring diversity, suitability, and reliability of research participants.
Manage and operate usability lab resources, remote testing platforms, recording and transcription workflows, and research repositories to preserve institutional knowledge and accelerate insights delivery.
Create compelling, persuasive research deliverables and presentations (written reports, video highlights, dashboards) tailored to executives, product teams, and engineering to drive action and prioritize fixes.
Provide hands-on mentoring, training, and coaching to designers, researchers, and product teams on usability methods, experimental design, accessibility best practices, and interpreting user data.
Integrate behavioral analytics, session replay, heatmaps, and customer support insights into usability research to root findings in real user behavior and support hypothesis generation.
Drive cross-functional workshops (e.g., design sprints, co-creation sessions, usability debriefs) to align teams on findings, solutions, and next steps that accelerate implementation.
Establish governance for design patterns and usability standards, recommend system-wide interaction guidelines, and maintain a centralized style and component documentation to preserve usability consistency.
Partner with QA and engineering to ensure usability and accessibility fixes are verified in release QA, provide acceptance criteria for UX tickets, and track regression risks.
Own usability-related vendor selection and management (remote test platforms, participant recruitment vendors, accessibility audit partners), including scope, contracts, and quality control.
Advocate for the user across the organization by communicating the cost of poor usability, quantifying user pain points, and building executive-level support for UX investments.
Prioritize usability work by balancing severity of user impact, technical effort, and strategic product outcomes; act as the usability decision maker on cross-functional prioritization discussions.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Maintain documentation of usability tests, research artifacts, and usability backlog in a central repository (Confluence, Notion, or equivalent).
Coordinate user education and internal training sessions to raise usability and accessibility awareness across the organization.
Assist in budget planning for UX research tools, participant incentives, and lab operations.
Monitor competitor products and industry trends to inform usability benchmarks and innovation opportunities.
Provide escalation support for urgent usability issues impacting live product releases and coordinate rapid remediation plans.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Expert in usability testing methodologies (lab-based, remote moderated, unmoderated) and creating test plans, scripts, and recruitment screeners.
Proficient with user research and prototyping tools such as Figma, Sketch, InVision, Axure, Optimal Workshop, Lookback, UserTesting, or similar platforms.
Strong knowledge of accessibility standards and testing (WCAG 2.1/2.2, ARIA, assistive technologies) and experience remediating accessibility defects.
Experience designing and interpreting A/B tests and experimentation frameworks in collaboration with analytics and product teams.
Familiarity with product analytics tools (Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude), session replay (Hotjar, FullStory), and quantitative analysis to combine behavioral data with qualitative findings.
Ability to perform heuristic evaluations and apply established usability principles and interaction design patterns.
Skilled in creating wireframes, interactive prototypes, and annotated design specifications for engineering handoffs.
Competence in recruiting research participants, managing panels, and running participant incentives and logistics.
Experience with usability lab setup and management, remote testing infrastructure, recording, transcription, and analysis workflows.
Basic technical literacy in HTML/CSS and front-end constraints to collaborate effectively with engineers on feasible design solutions.
Strong data literacy including basic statistics for interpreting task metrics, confidence intervals, and sample size considerations.
Experience creating dashboards and visualizations to communicate usability metrics and trends to stakeholders.

Soft Skills

Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to craft persuasive research narratives for executives and cross-functional teams.
Strong stakeholder management and influencing ability to prioritize usability work and secure resources.
Exceptional empathy and user advocacy — able to represent diverse user needs and translate them into product decisions.
Facilitation skills to run workshops, co-creation sessions, and design critiques that drive consensus.
Critical thinking and problem-solving mindset, able to synthesize complex data into actionable recommendations.
Project and time management skills to run multiple research streams and ensure timely delivery of findings.
Coaching and mentoring ability to upskill designers and product teams in usability best practices.
Adaptability and resilience when working within fast-paced, iterative product environments.
Attention to detail in documenting research protocols, findings, and acceptance criteria for implementation.
Collaborative mindset — proven ability to build effective partnerships with product, design, engineering, analytics, and customer support.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Psychology, Cognitive Science, Interaction Design, Computer Science, Human Factors, Anthropology, or related field.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree in HCI, Human Factors, UX Research, Cognitive Psychology, Design Research, or equivalent advanced degree and/or relevant certifications (e.g., Nielsen Norman Group UX Certification, Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
Cognitive Psychology / Behavioral Science
Interaction Design / Information Architecture
Human Factors / Ergonomics
Anthropology / Qualitative Research Methods

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–10+ years of experience in usability, UX research, or interaction design with a proven track record of leading end-to-end usability programs for digital products.

Preferred:

7+ years in progressively senior usability or UX research roles, including experience leading cross-functional programs, managing vendor relationships, and delivering measurable UX improvements.
Demonstrated experience with accessibility compliance (WCAG) and delivering accessibility remediation at scale.
Experience in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, government) or complex enterprise systems is a plus.
Portfolio or case studies that include usability test artifacts, research synthesis, quantitative metrics, and examples of business impact from usability improvements.