Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for UX Research Officer

🎯 Role Definition

The UX Research Officer drives user-centered product decisions by planning, executing, synthesizing, and evangelizing research across digital products and services. This role leads mixed-methods research programs—combining qualitative and quantitative approaches—to uncover user needs, validate hypotheses, reduce product risk, and inform design and product strategy. The UX Research Officer partners with product managers, designers, engineers, marketing, and analytics teams to translate research findings into clear recommendations, prioritized opportunities, and measurable UX outcomes.

This job is ideal for a results-oriented researcher who can operate at both strategic and tactical levels: designing rigorous studies, running remote and in-person usability tests, analyzing behavioral and attitudinal data, and communicating impact to senior stakeholders.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

UX Researcher or Senior UX Researcher transitioning to broader program leadership
Product Designer or User Experience Designer with strong research focus
Market Researcher, Behavioral Scientist, Human Factors Specialist with applied UX experience

Advancement To:

Senior UX Research Officer / Lead UX Researcher
Head of UX Research / Research Manager
Director of User Experience or Director of Product Research
Chief Design Officer, Head of Product, or VP of UX

Lateral Moves:

Product Manager with strong user research expertise
UX Designer specializing in research-driven design
Design Operations or Research Operations lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead the design and execution of end-to-end UX research programs that combine qualitative and quantitative methods (interviews, diary studies, contextual inquiry, surveys, analytics-driven research) to answer critical product questions and reduce customer risk.
Plan and facilitate generative research to discover unmet user needs, validate assumptions, and identify opportunities that inform product strategy and roadmap prioritization.
Conduct evaluative usability testing (moderated and unmoderated, remote and in-person) to measure task success, identify usability issues, and provide actionable recommendations to designers and engineers.
Create and run A/B and multivariate experiments in partnership with product analytics and engineering to validate design changes and quantify UX impact on key business metrics (engagement, retention, conversion).
Synthesize complex qualitative and quantitative findings into clear, concise artifacts—research reports, executive briefs, journey maps, personas, UX metrics dashboards—and present outcomes to cross-functional teams and senior leadership.
Translate research insights into prioritized recommendations with clear hypotheses, success metrics, and implementation guidance for product, design, and engineering teams.
Establish and maintain a continuous discovery cadence, integrating rapid research methods (quick interviews, guerrilla testing, remote unmoderated studies) into agile development processes.
Develop and maintain research repositories, templates, and knowledge management systems to ensure findings are discoverable, reusable, and linked to product decisions.
Drive participant recruitment strategies, including screening, incentivization, and vendor coordination, to ensure representative and ethical sampling across target user segments.
Partner with data science and analytics teams to design mixed-method studies that triangulate behavioral data and attitudinal insights, including cohort analysis and funnel diagnostics.
Lead stakeholder engagement and alignment efforts: run research planning workshops, co-create research questions with product partners, and ensure research scope maps to strategic business goals.
Mentor and coach junior researchers, designers, and cross-functional partners in research methods, study design, and interpretation of results to raise organizational research literacy.
Ensure research activities meet privacy, ethical, and accessibility standards; collaborate with legal and security teams when needed to maintain compliance.
Manage multiple concurrent studies, timelines, budgets, and external vendors while delivering high-quality, actionable insights on cadence with product development cycles.
Design and run longitudinal and diary-style studies to observe user behavior over time and measure the long-term adoption and satisfaction of product features.
Conduct heuristic evaluations and expert reviews to quickly surface usability problems and build an evidence base for design recommendations.
Create and maintain UX metrics and KPIs (e.g., SUS, NPS, task success, time on task) and report on trends that tie user experience to business outcomes.
Facilitate cross-functional synthesis sessions and design critiques where research findings are translated into experimental product changes and prioritized backlogs.
Advocate for an inclusive research approach by recruiting diverse user groups, testing accessibility scenarios, and ensuring products serve a broad spectrum of users.
Build business cases for user-focused initiatives by quantifying user pain points, estimating opportunity size, and recommending prioritized interventions to stakeholders.
Design and implement scalable research operations (participant panels, tools selection, recruitment pipelines, budget management) to increase throughput and reduce time-to-insight.
Collaborate with product marketing and customer success to incorporate customer feedback loops, post-release validations, and research-informed messaging.
Maintain a competitive research practice by scanning industry trends, synthesizing external benchmarks, and advising product teams on innovation opportunities.
Lead post-launch evaluations and retrospective studies to measure the impact of design changes, identify unintended consequences, and iterate on solutions.

Secondary Functions

Support organizational learning by developing research training programs, internal workshops, and office hours for product and design teams.
Maintain vendor relationships, negotiate contracts for research labs and recruitment services, and manage external research engagements when capacity requires.
Contribute to the continuous improvement of research tools and platforms (usability testing software, survey platforms, analytics dashboards, prototype labs).
Coordinate with analytics teams to automate recurring UX reports and dashboards that track product health and user experience over time.
Participate in product roadmap discussions to help prioritize features based on evidence of user need, feasibility, and business impact.
Serve as an internal advocate for accessibility and inclusive design practices by auditing product flows and advising on remediation strategies.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Advanced qualitative research methods: in-depth interviews, contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, and thematic analysis.
Quantitative research and analytics: survey design, statistical testing, cohort analysis, and interpretation of behavioral data (GA, Amplitude, Mixpanel).
Usability testing expertise across moderated and unmoderated formats using tools like UserTesting, Lookback, PlaybookUX, or similar.
Proficiency in research synthesis and storytelling: affinity mapping, thematic synthesis, journey maps, personas, and actionable research reports.
Experimental design for product testing: A/B testing frameworks, hypothesis formulation, and measurement of UX impact on KPIs.
Familiarity with prototyping and design tools (Figma, Sketch, InVision) to set up testable prototypes and collaborate with designers.
Experience with research operations and tools: participant recruitment platforms, research repositories, knowledge bases, and CRM integration.
Basic statistics and data analysis skills (Excel, R, Python, SPSS, or similar) to analyze quantitative research and work with analytics teams.
Accessibility research knowledge: testing assistive technologies, WCAG guidelines, and integrating accessibility findings into product flows.
Strong documentation skills: creating concise research briefs, consent forms, recruitment screener scripts, and executive summaries.
Experience working with cross-functional agile teams and participating in sprint planning, refinement, and demo cycles.
Familiarity with privacy and ethical research standards (GDPR, CCPA) and practical experience managing sensitive user data.

Soft Skills

Exceptional communication and storytelling skills to translate complex user insights into persuasive, actionable recommendations for executives and product teams.
Strong stakeholder management and influence: ability to align diverse teams around research findings and drive product decisions.
Strategic thinking: connecting user evidence to business goals, prioritizing research investments, and shaping product strategy.
Curiosity and empathy: deep user empathy and a relentless curiosity to understand user behavior and motivations.
Project management and organizational skills to manage multiple research streams, timelines, and budgets effectively.
Facilitations skills for running workshops, synthesis sessions, and cross-functional planning meetings.
Critical thinking and problem-solving to design rigorous studies, interpret ambiguous signals, and recommend practical solutions.
Adaptability and pragmatism: choosing the right research method for constraints (time, budget, sample) while maintaining rigor.
Coaching and mentoring: ability to grow research capability across the organization through training and one-on-one mentorship.
Attention to detail and quality orientation when documenting methods, consent protocols, and final deliverables.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Psychology, Cognitive Science, Anthropology, Sociology, or a related field.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree or higher in HCI, Human Factors, Cognitive Psychology, Behavioral Science, Anthropology, or a related discipline.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
Cognitive Psychology / Psychology
Human Factors / Ergonomics
Anthropology / Sociology
Interaction Design / Product Design
Behavioral Science / Market Research

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8 years of applied UX research experience in digital product organizations, including demonstrable experience running end-to-end research programs.

Preferred: 5+ years leading mixed-methods research that directly influenced product strategy and measurable business outcomes; experience mentoring other researchers and managing research operations.