User Researcher

6 month contract

inside ir35

remote but need to be comforable travelling for customer meetings and once a month to London

What is a User Researcher?

• A User Researcher finds out who the users are, what they need, what problems they have, and how they actually use a product or service.
• They gather evidence through interviews, usability testing, workshops, surveys, analytics, user groups and observation.
• Their job is to make sure product decisions are based on real user insight, not assumptions from Product, Sales or Engineering.
• They turn research into practical outputs such as user needs, personas, user journeys, pain points, recommendations and usability findings.
• They help teams understand why users behave a certain way, what is confusing, what needs improving, and what should be prioritised.

How is User Research different to User Experience / UX?

• UX is the broader discipline of designing the overall user experience of a product or service.
• User Research is one part of UX, focused specifically on understanding users and generating insight.
• A UX Designer may design screens, journeys, wireframes and prototypes.
• A User Researcher tests, validates and informs those designs by speaking to users and analysing behaviour.
• In smaller teams, there can be overlap: a UR may create basic wireframes/prototypes for testing, but they are not usually expected to be a full visual/UI designer.
• Simple version: UX designs the experience; UR provides the evidence about what users need and whether the experience works.

What they do in a SaaS product team

• Work with Product Managers, Designers and Engineers to understand what users need from the software.
• Support the full product lifecycle: discovery, alpha, beta and live.
• Run research before build starts, so the team knows what problem they are solving.
• Test prototypes or existing product features with users to see what works and what causes confusion.
• Feed findings into product roadmaps, backlogs and design decisions.
• Help prioritise product improvements based on user pain, usage data and customer feedback.
• Support product teams by running user groups, interviews, usability sessions and stakeholder workshops.
• Present findings clearly to Product, Engineering and commercial stakeholders.
• In a SaaS environment, they may look at how different customer types use the product, where users drop off, what features are underused, and what causes support tickets.
• For this Civica role, the key context is local government software, so users could be council staff, administrators, service users, case workers or other public-sector users.

What to look for in candidates

• Senior User Researcher / UX Researcher background.
• Experience working in software product teams, ideally SaaS or complex digital products.
• Strong experience with qualitative research: interviews, usability testing, user groups, contextual research.
• Some experience with quantitative research: surveys, analytics, usage data, product metrics.
• Agile product experience — working ahead of Product and Engineering teams.
• Able to work independently and plan research without much hand-holding.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and stakeholder challenge.
• Strong research outputs: user needs, personas, journeys, recommendations, insight reports.
• Inclusive research / accessibility awareness.
• Local government / local authority experience is desirable, not essential.
• Figma and Pendo are nice-to-haves, not core must-haves.

Terms to search on

• User Researcher
• Senior User Researcher
• Lead User Researcher
• UX Researcher
• User Experience Researcher
• UXR
• User Centred Design / UCD
• Service Designer — worth checking, but not always the same
• UX Consultant
• Research Consultant
• Product Researcher
• Digital Researcher
• GDS
• Discovery / Alpha / Beta / Live
• Usability Testing
• User Needs
• User Journeys
• Personas
• Inclusive Design
• Accessibility / WCAG
• Local Government
• Local Authority
• Public Sector
• SaaS
• Figma
• Pendo
• Amplitude
• Mixpanel
• Hotjar