(Senior) UX Researcher, TV Commerce

Job Description

Teamwork makes the stream work

Roku is changing how the world watches TV

Roku is the #1 TV streaming platform in the U.S., and we’ve set our sights on powering every television in the world. Roku pioneered streaming to the TV. Our mission is to be the TV streaming platform that connects the entire TV ecosystem. We connect consumers to the content they love, enable content publishers to build and monetize large audiences, and provide advertisers unique capabilities to engage consumers.

Our talented and diverse UX team delights users one design at a time, while building and enhancing a UX culture within Roku that nurtures our ongoing enrichment and elevates the UX maturity across the company and the industry.

About the Role

Roku is looking for an experienced UX Researcher to drive impactful research to optimize effectiveness and user experience with Roku User Merchandising (RUM), a set of features that reaches tens of millions of existing customers regularly for the purpose of directly selling Roku products including TVs, Players, soundbars, remote controls, headphones, and other accessories. Small changes in the user experience of these features can be responsible for millions of dollars in revenue and help extend the positive relationship with our customers.

Note: Roku only offers two titles: “UX Researcher” and “Senior UX Researcher”.

To be considered for the Senior title, a candidate should have at least six years of industry experience.

This role is open to a remote, US-based person.

What You’ll Do in This Role

• Develop, plan, and execute research initiatives in collaboration with UX Research managers, other UX researchers, Product managers, sales, marketing, UX Designers, and others
• Utilize your research insights to influence simple and effective user experiences with RUM features, maximizing product sales as well as a positive user experience
• Collect and analyze user behavior through both generative and evaluative methodologies
• Effectively present research insights to diverse stakeholder audiences through written reports and presentations
• Work closely with Product Managers to identify the problems and business goals that your research will address
• Bring user research insights to a group of talented UX Designers as they innovate and design new features and products
• Collaborate with fellow world-class user researchers, across a range of different product areas

What You’ll Bring to the Table

• Proven skill with a broad methodological toolkit, ideally including interviews, usability testing, field studies, diary studies, survey design, and quantitative analysis including A/B testing
• Confidence in selecting the most appropriate methods for a given problem or question
• Experience collaborating with teams of designers, researchers, product managers, and engineers throughout the product development process
• Excellent communication, facilitation, presentation, interpersonal, and analytical skills
• Experience with mixed methods research
• Strong project management skills with the ability to define, plan, and lead projects forward
• Past experience working with sales and marketing teams is a plus
• Confidence with a range of research methods experience (not just focused on one type such as usability testing)
• Comfortable with accepting some guidance from UX Research managers or senior-level researchers in order to optimize the research approach
• A broad range of experience in research methods (qualitative as well as quantitative, e.g., large surveys, etc.)
• An ability to operate autonomously: You have significant experience owning the research approach for whole products, including multi-phase planning; building relationships with stakeholders and including them in the process; and proactively suggesting research needs/methods.
• A passion for researching people
• 6+ years’ experience in UX and the ability to work independently with a product team (for a “Senior” title)

During Your First Year in This Role, You’ll

• Conduct many impactful user studies for RUM features, and other Roku products and features, in a fast-paced environment
• Work closely with your UX design partners, UX leadership, and RUM business leadership to help shape the research strategy, balancing generative and evaluative research to both deepen our user understanding and fine tune the user experience
• Closely collaborate with experts in Engineering, Design, and Product Management to understand product and business strategy, and find the right balance between user and business needs
• Partner with our stellar UX Designers in your research planning and execution to give them the most salient information for the next round of design decisions
• Give well thought-out presentations in formal research share-out's, walking your audience through your research process and insights to tell a story about our users to stakeholders
• Show concrete impact of your research work on RUM feature engagement (sales), and on how users feel about the features (sentiment research)
• Participate in the deeply synergistic team of UXers at Roku – you’ll share knowledge, exchange ideas, and have one of the best sounding boards in the tech industry.

About Our Hiring Process for this Role

We know your time is valuable, so we love being transparent about our hiring processes.

For this UX Research role, we typically start with short introduction with our dedicated Roku recruiter, and then you’ll have a casual “coffee chat” with one of our hiring managers. After that, we’ll ask you to do a 45-minute presentation to a panel of three or four interviewers. In this presentation, we’ll want you to walk us through a project you’ve done that you’re especially proud of. You’ll tell us what your role was, what your process was, what went well and what didn’t, how it turned out, and what you learned from it. We then ask you to walk through a brief research exercise that we will provide you in advance so we can learn how you think about and approach research. Finally, you’ll have one-on-one meetings with each of the 3-4 interviewers, and that’s it! Throughout the process, your Roku recruiter will be there for you every step of the way.

We’d love to tell you more details about this role, the responsibilities you’ll have, and the products you’ll be working on – let’s talk!

More About Us

Roku has become famous for making sure each feature and product is as perfect as it can be - just look at our remote control or user interface - while still pushing the boundaries of what it means to watch TV. In order to help ship features and products, you will partner with product management and engineering leaders to innovate and deliver features and capabilities across the Roku platform, while maintaining the integrity and cohesiveness of our user experience. Great candidates are comfortable with ambiguity, though that isn't code for "sloppy." Even when you aren't sure, you should move forward precisely and quickly knowing that action creates its own certainty. And because everyone here is empowered, your performance at Roku tends to come from getting others to embrace your idea. It's the most collaborative people who can drop their ego in service of their customers and create the win-win of success for our customers.

We believe that great user experiences come from people who have the vision to see the big picture on the macro side while still maintaining an incredible attention to detail on the micro side. More than ability to keep the vision while managing the minutiae: We need someone who can play three-dimensional chess on the axes of what our customers need, what our world-class engineers can produce, with the third axis being keeping things as elegantly easy as possible (and no more).

The Roku Culture

Roku is a great place for people who want to work in a fast-paced environment where everyone is focused on the company’s success rather than their own. We try to surround ourselves with people who are great at their jobs, who are easy to work with, and who keep their egos in check. We appreciate a sense of humor. We’re independent thinkers with big ideas who act boldly, move fast and accomplish extraordinary things through collaboration and trust. In short, at Roku you’ll be part of a company that’s changing how the world watches TV.
We have a unique culture that we are proud of. We think of ourselves primarily as problem-solvers, which itself is a two-part idea. We come up with the solution, but the solution isn’t real until it is impeccably designed, flawlessly built, and delivered to the customer. That penchant for action gives us a pragmatic approach to innovation, one that has served us well since 2002.

Check out what some of our current UX Designers have to say! Hear from one of our leaders!

Or hear directly from dozens of our Roku staff around the world at http://bit.ly/WeAreRokuVideos.

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