Job Description

Yahoo serves as a trusted guide for hundreds of millions of people globally, helping them achieve their goals online through our portfolio of iconic products. For advertisers, Yahoo Advertising offers omnichannel solutions and powerful data to engage with our brands and deliver results.

About the Company

Yahoo serves as a trusted guide for hundreds of millions of people globally, helping them achieve their goals online through our portfolio of iconic products. For advertisers, Yahoo Advertising offers omnichannel solutions and powerful data to engage with our brands and deliver results. 

A Little About Us

The Research team is committed to championing people-centered experiences that bridge the gap between our users, designers, product managers, engineers, marketing, and editorial to generate empathy and identify opportunities to improve our product experiences. We are a team embedded across product organizations. We sit side by side with all of the teams and work hard to ensure collaboration, communication, and visibility. We are looking to hire an experienced User Experience Researcher to play a critical role in our Yahoo Search research team. 

A Lot About You:

As a Principal User Researcher, you have a proven track record of shaping and delivering a wide range of generative and evaluative UX research projects across the entirety of the product life cycle. Your thought leadership and deliverables will be critical in our ongoing effort to better enable product and design teams to make informed, confident decisions and to set the strategy for future products and features. 

At Yahoo, you will collaborate with a multitude of stakeholders in a challenging environment to deliver key insights that will drive the next generation of our products. We are a fast-moving company, and direct experience in both traditional and modern approaches to recruitment, diverse research methods, and impactful reporting is a must. No matter if you are engaging in usability studies, survey design, competitive analysis, usage data analysis, contextual inquiry, or ethnographic research, you are a deep and insightful thinker who both revels in the challenge of a complex problem and can bring a fresh perspective to your work. 

Specifically, the Principal User Experience Researcher will work in Yahoo Search focusing on iterative and innovative product research where there is a need for a well-versed mixed methods researcher. We are looking for someone with demonstrated expertise in generative and evaluative research methodologies (qualitative and quantitative) with experience in UX Research, and some experience in market research/consumer insights. 

In addition, the principal researcher will have strong consumer sense, strategic thinking, and the ability to see the big picture. Having effective problem-solving and communication skills as well as good common sense, will enable you to succeed in this role. You’ll have a broad scope of responsibilities and opportunities to make a significant impact on product and business, as a strategic and tactical partner to Yahoo Search’ decision-makers through pre-, mid-, and post-decision stages.

What you’ll be doing

• Identifying research needs and key research objectives in partnership with product, design, and engineering teams to address research needs for a variety of products and projects throughout the product life cycle. 

• Choosing the right research to do at the right time and synthesizing results into a coherent and truthful story, as well as creating effective models and frameworks that reflect those results, such as task flows, journey maps, mind maps, and user segments. 

• Working with product and design teams in identifying research needs and creating optimal studies tackling right problems using the appropriate research methods (moderated and unmoderated remote interviews, usability tests, diary studies, surveys, CSAT, concept tests, needs/market sizing, heuristic evaluation, competitive analysis, ...)

• Using both qualitative and quantitative research methods and employing mixed methods when necessary. 

• Designing compelling and digestible deliverables focused on visually telling the story and highlighting important insights for longevity, providing a holistic point of view with necessary product behavioral data, working closely with Yahoo Analytics

• Socializing, collaborating, and presenting research to multiple teams and leaders across the organization 

Other additional responsibilities

• Developing learning plans for Search and Search user research roadmap 

• Mentoring junior and mid-level UX researchers by providing guidance, feedback, and support, to ensure the quality of research work and contribute to the overall success and growth of the research team.

• Collaborating to define best practice frameworks, research methodologies and documentation surrounding research activities

Qualifications - What you will bring to the table

• Bachelor’s or Master’s in HCI, Information Systems, Computer Science, Cognitive Science, Machine Learning, or similar field of study

• 10+ years of experience in digital product end-to-end research mixed methodology (both qualitative and quantitative, primary and secondary) and driving product/design decisions. 

• 5+ years of experience in Search products with user research leading to user satisfaction

• Experience in conducting various research methodologies by selecting the right ones for generative, iterative, and evaluative studies throughout the product development lifecycle, and prioritizing multiple research requests successfully. 

• Experience in Agile product development environment. A healthy understanding of how to balance the fast-paced, flexible nature of generative research with the rigor, and leverage A/B testings focusing on iterative product/design development

• Technical knowledge of quantitative research and online surveys, sampling, questionnaire development, and reporting

• A portfolio demonstrating previous work experience and deliverables, that illustrate how your research informed business strategy and product decisions, and your research pipeline and your ability to extract actionable insights from qualitative and quantitative data

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in conducting market/consumer trend research and competitor landscape analysis, and synthesizing data from multi-method studies, including large-scale data.

• Experience with behavioral data analysis (e.g., synthesizing behavioral data and UXR learnings)

• Working knowledge of heuristic evaluation to conduct competitive analysis focusing on product features and user experience

• Experience in research in AI-powered products, services, or features exploring how users perceive and interact with them, user benefits and concerns, ethical implications, etc

#L1-SO

Yahoo is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to, and will not be discriminated against based on age, race, gender, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability or any other protected category. Yahoo is dedicated to providing an accessible environment for all candidates during the application process and for employees during their employment. If you need accessibility assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability, please submit a request via the Accommodation Request Form (www.yahooinc.com/careers/contact-us.html) or call 408-336-1409. Requests and calls received for non-disability related issues, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.

At Yahoo, we know that diversity makes us stronger. We are committed to a collaborative, inclusive environment that encourages authenticity and fosters a sense of belonging. We strive for everyone to feel valued, connected, and empowered to reach their potential and contribute their best. Check out our diversity and inclusion (www.yahooinc.com/diversity/) page to learn more.

The compensation for this position ranges from $136,125.00 - $283,750.00/yr and will vary depending on factors such as your location, skills and experience. The compensation package may also include incentive compensation opportunities in the form of discretionary annual bonus or commissions, in addition to equity incentives. Yahoo provides industry-leading benefits including healthcare, 401K savings plan, company holidays, vacation, sick time, parental leave and an employee assistance program. Eligibility requirements apply.

Yahoo has a high degree of flexibility around employee location and hybrid working. In fact, our flexible-hybrid approach to work is one of the things our employees rave about. Most roles don’t require specific regular patterns of in-person office attendance. If you join Yahoo, you may be asked to attend (or travel to attend) on-site work sessions, team-building, or other in-person events. When these occur, you’ll be given notice to make arrangements. 

If you’re curious about how this factors into this role, please discuss with the recruiter.

Currently work for Yahoo? Please apply on our internal career site.