Design Researcher

HARMAN’s engineers and designers are creative, purposeful and agile. As part of this team, you’ll combine your technical expertise with innovative ideas to help drive cutting-edge solutions in the car, enterprise and connected ecosystem. Every day, you will push the boundaries of creative design, and HARMAN is committed to providing you with the opportunities, innovative technologies and resources to build a successful career.

A Career at HARMAN

As a technology leader that is rapidly on the move, HARMAN is filled with people who are focused on making life better. Innovation, inclusivity and teamwork are a part of our DNA. When you add that to the challenges we take on and solve together, you’ll discover that at HARMAN you can grow, make a difference and be proud of the work you do everyday.

About the role

Huemen Design is seeking a talented individual to elevate the practice of research. This role will contribute to the practice of Design Research with rigorous qualitative, quantitative, and/or design research methods across a variety of industries and product categories across HARMAN as well as for external direct clients. We practice a user-centered, collaborative, and iterative design process with a focus on simplicity, trust, seamlessness and humanization. This role will report to the Director, Design Research.

Your Team

We are a team of passionate researchers, strategists, and business analysts that have a strong desire to provide value with empowering data. Our goal is to help clients find the right problems to solve, identify where their business provides the most value, and understand their users so they can become the industry benchmark. We are comfortable with ambiguity, strive to find non-obvious insights, love to learn from others, and enjoy taking on new challenges.

What You Will Do
- Work with clients both internal and external to understand it’s particular business need, working across all divisions and business units to create research planning activities with product managers, designers, engineers and other partners and identify research questions to create research proposals that are properly scoped with appropriate research methodologies.
- Disseminate intricate research data. Provide analysis of information to HARMAN and project leaders including senior level executives, present research findings and recommendations in a clear and compelling manner, translating technical information in a way the client can understand.
- Support design discovery phases of projects by guiding empathetic research activities such as user interviews and observation, benchmarking, journey mapping, persona development, and design thinking workshops.
- Support planning and executing research with a variety of qualitative, quantitative and mixed research methods including literature reviews, surveys, generative and evaluative user testing, heuristic evaluations, and others.
- Support communication of compelling stories to make research findings relevant, actionable, and impactful by balancing user, business and technology goals and presenting in a variety of formats - e.g., presentations, videos, posters.
- Analyze research to find solutions to complex and technical design issues.
- Contribute to best practices for the execution of all research projects globally to lead clients and projects from ambiguity through process driven research, to deliver clear and defined fact-based recommendations.

What You Need
- 2-4 years of experience with planning, executing, and reporting design research applied to product design
- Bachelor’s degree in a human behavior related field, such as Cognitive Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction, User Experience, Human Factors, Engineering Psychology, Interactive Design, or equivalent, Master’s degree would be nice to have
- Experience with planning, prioritizing, conducting, analyzing and communicating research in a variety of contexts
- Excellent verbal / written communication and interpersonal skills with the ability to communicate effectively with all stakeholders, customers, and team members
- Experience with synthesizing and socializing actionable insights that have impact
- Experience in the use of the latest tools and techniques in qualitative and quantitative design research
- Experience in Design Thinking and human-centered design, with experience in persona development, journey and experience mapping
- Comfortable managing ambiguity, working autonomously, and multi-tasking in an agile environment
- Ability to work independently and use strong analytical and problem-solving skills

What is Nice to Have
- Demonstrated customer/client relationship experience for a creative design agency
- Published articles related to the field of design research in a technical conference or professional organization

What We Offer
- HARMAN offers a diverse and inclusive work environment that fosters and encourages career development opportunities, professional training and