Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for User Experience Coordinator

🎯 Role Definition

The User Experience Coordinator is the operational and tactical lead for day-to-day UX activities: organizing and executing usability studies, recruiting and managing test participants, documenting findings, maintaining UX artefacts (wireframes, prototypes, research repositories), and ensuring research outcomes are translated into prioritized product improvements. This role acts as a bridge between product management, design, engineering and business stakeholders, enabling scalable, user-centered design practices and measurable improvements in usability and product adoption.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Junior UX Designer or UX Research Assistant with 0–2 years of hands-on testing and coordination experience
Product Coordinator or Product Analyst who has supported design or research initiatives
Customer Experience or Support Specialist transitioning to a research-facing role

Advancement To:

Senior UX Coordinator / UX Operations Lead
UX Researcher or UX Designer (mid-level)
Product Designer or Product Manager (with additional product/strategy experience)

Lateral Moves:

UX Researcher
Design Program Manager
Product Analyst / Customer Insights Specialist

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Plan, recruit, and manage research participants across panels and third-party vendors, including screening criteria, scheduling, incentives, and GDPR/privacy compliance to ensure representative test audiences.
Design, write, and maintain usability test scripts, interview guides, survey instruments, and task scenarios that align with research questions and product goals.
Facilitate and moderate remote and in-person usability tests, contextual interviews, card sorts, focus groups, and prototype walkthroughs while capturing high-quality notes, video clips, and session artifacts.
Synthesize qualitative and quantitative research findings into concise insights, user journey maps, empathy maps, and actionable design recommendations for product and engineering partners.
Create and maintain interactive prototypes and low-to-high fidelity wireframes using tools such as Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, or Axure to validate concepts and communicate interaction patterns.
Coordinate cross-functional research sprints, manage participant pipelines, and ensure timely handoff of research deliverables to product owners and design teams.
Develop and maintain a centralized research repository (confluence, Notion, Dovetail, Airtable) with tagged findings, templates, and past-study artifacts to enable reuse and organizational learning.
Track and report on UX metrics and KPIs—task completion, SUS, NPS, time-on-task, drop-off—to measure usability improvements and research impact over time.
Manage logistics for moderated and unmoderated testing platforms (UserTesting, Lookback, Validately, Maze) including setting up tests, distribution, and result extraction.
Support A/B test ideation and experiment design with product analytics teams, ensuring research contributes to hypothesis generation and interpretation of results.
Conduct heuristic evaluations and usability audits across web and mobile products to identify accessibility and interaction issues according to WCAG and common usability patterns.
Prioritize research insights and usability issues alongside product managers and designers to create clear, actionable product backlog items and acceptance criteria.
Maintain design system documentation by cataloging components, interaction rules, and accessibility notes; collaborate with designers and engineers to ensure consistent implementation.
Run stakeholder review sessions, design crits, and research readouts that present evidence-based recommendations and win alignment for usability changes.
Provide operational support for distributed design teams including managing tag-based version control, file naming conventions, and cross-team libraries in design tools.
Train and onboard new researchers, designers, product managers and research partners on research best practices, tools, and templates to raise organizational capability.
Coordinate with legal, security, and data teams to ensure research activities follow company policies and data protection requirements.
Manage budgets and vendor relationships for participant recruitment platforms, remote testing services, and specialized research tooling.
Capture and escalate critical usability issues discovered in research sessions to engineering and product teams for rapid remediation of severe defects.
Facilitate participatory workshops (co-creation, discovery, story mapping) with stakeholders, synthesizing outcomes into prioritized user stories and prototypes.
Translate technical constraints and engineering feedback into researchable questions, aligning technical feasibility with user needs and business goals.
Monitor industry UX trends, competitive experiences, and accessibility innovations and recommend adoption of new patterns or tools that improve the product experience.
Prepare executive-level summaries and visual one-pagers that succinctly communicate user problems, recommended solutions, expected impact and next steps.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc user behavior analysis and usability quick-checks to unblock product decisions.
Maintain and update participant incentive processes, tracking reimbursements and tax requirements.
Assist in creating onboarding materials and micro-guides for new product features based on observed usability issues.
Collaborate with customer support and success teams to funnel qualitative feedback into research questions and backlog items.
Help configure analytics events and funnels in collaboration with analytics engineers to validate research hypotheses quantitatively.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies to ensure research outputs are scheduled and resourced appropriately.
Support procurement and evaluation of new UX tools and testing platforms; run pilot tests and recommend vendor selection.
Help manage accessibility remediation logs and coordinate verification of fixes post-implementation.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Usability testing (moderated and unmoderated) — planning, moderation, note-taking, synthesis, and reporting.
Prototyping and wireframing proficiency in Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, Axure or equivalent tools.
UX research methods: contextual interviews, diary studies, card sorting, tree testing, surveys and ethnography.
Familiarity with research and repository tools such as Dovetail, Lookback, UserTesting, Maze, Optimal Workshop, or similar.
Basic knowledge of web and mobile technologies (HTML/CSS fundamentals, responsive design) to communicate effectively with engineers.
Accessibility standards and best practices (WCAG 2.1) and experience running accessibility checks or audits.
Analytics literacy: experience interpreting product analytics (Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude) to complement qualitative insights.
Experience managing design systems, component libraries and version control for design assets.
Participant recruitment and panel management, including screening, compensation, and privacy compliance.
Proficiency in documentation and collaboration tools (Confluence, Notion, Airtable, Jira, Trello).

Soft Skills

Strong stakeholder management — aligning product, design and engineering teams around research-driven priorities.
Excellent written and verbal communication for clear research reports, executive summaries, and presentations.
Facilitation and workshop leadership skills to drive productive ideation and synthesis sessions.
Critical thinking and problem framing to convert vague product questions into testable research plans.
Time management and project coordination skills to run multiple concurrent studies and deliverables.
Empathy and user-centric mindset for interpreting qualitative data and advocating for user needs.
Attention to detail for accurate participant screening, session capture, and research artifact management.
Collaboration and diplomacy — able to surface UX issues without causing stakeholder friction.
Adaptability to switch between high-level strategy and hands-on execution as project needs change.
Ethical judgment regarding participant privacy, consent, and data handling.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Psychology, Interaction Design, Information Science, Cognitive Science, Communications, or a related discipline.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree or diploma in HCI, Design Research, UX, Human Factors, or equivalent professional UX certifications (NN/g UX Certificate, IIT Institute, General Assembly).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
Interaction Design or Visual Communication
Cognitive Psychology or Human Factors
Information Architecture
Anthropology, Sociology or Qualitative Research Methods

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

2–5 years of professional experience in UX research coordination, usability testing, UX operations, or a closely related field.

Preferred:

3+ years coordinating multi-method UX research programs, with demonstrated experience running remote and in-person studies, maintaining research repositories, and influencing product decisions through research insights.
Experience working in agile product teams, managing stakeholder expectations, and contributing to cross-functional roadmaps.