Home > Job Bank > North America > Design Researcher, Yahoo! Mail

Design Researcher, Yahoo! Mail
Yahoo! Inc.
Sunnyvale, CA, USA

As the No. 1 Internet brand, Yahoo! serves hundreds of millions of people worldwide. That's a whole lot of human beings making Yahoo! their destination of choice. The Sunnyvale, CA based Communications and Consumer Services User Experience Group designs many of the leading products and services for that population: including Mail, Messenger, Photos, Address Book, Personals, Mobile, set-top, and desktop applications.

Under new creative leadership, we're staffing up to take a quantum leap forward in the ways that people connect with one another on planet earth. If you're a brilliant design researcher who dreams up new interaction metaphors in your sleep, then we need your brains and skills to help make it happen. And we're prepared to compensate you well for your contributions.

  • What do YOU think needs to be done to seamlessly bridge devices like cameras, mobile phones, terrestrial phones, TV, music players and computers to make end-to-end user experiences feel fluid and effortless?
  • How do YOU think that various communications modalities should come together to enable dynamic shifting between synchronous and asynchronous temporal relationships?
  • What services and tools do YOU imagine should be offered with unlimited storage to enable social networks to bloom more fully than ever before? And how would you employ those technologies to help people looking for a soul mate?

If you're ready for the challenge, check yourself for the following personal characteristics:

  • Armed with competitive technical know-how
  • Even keeled and comfortable in a kitchen with multiple cooks
  • Design for big picture strategic integration and don't sweat the small stuff
  • Totally sweat the small stuff and will do whatever it takes to ship with fit & finish
  • Can embrace "Life Engine" as your mantra

RESPONSIBILITIES

You will be a key member of the User Experience & Design team for the Yahoo! Mail product suite. This interdisciplinary team consists of smart and fun interaction designers, design researchers, visual designers, and prototypers that matrix into a functional organization of product managers, engineers, and marketing professionals. The team's opportunity is to define and develop a growing suite of email, address book and PIM offerings for ubiquitous, easy to use, and engaging communications.

URL http://mail.yahoo.com

  • Responsible for the user research, including planning and running usability studies, benchmark studies, competitive evaluations, participatory design sessions, ethnographic field studies, user surveys, heuristic evaluations, and similar methods.
  • Provide insight and vision for the team based on researching user needs. Convert research findings into actionable items.
  • Collaborate with other research organizations within Yahoo! (market researchers and data mining analysts) in order to create comprehensive coordinated research.
  • Synthesize research findings from other data sources (including market research and data mining) into meaningful recommendations and actionable items.

ADDITIONAL QUALIFICATIONS

  • Master's degree or Ph.D. in Human Factors, Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive or Experimental Psychology, Cognitive Science, Anthropology, or related area (or equivalent experience)
  • At least 5 years experience in user experience research, conducting ethnographic research, heuristic evaluations, usability testing, benchmark testing, competitive evaluations, and questionnaire/survey design within a product development organization
  • Must demonstrate strength in a broad range of research techniques, creative approaches to researching complex user experience problems, and effective communications

The time is now. Send your resume and portfolio link to alicecb@yahoo-inc.com and be sure to reference the job ID # RX0400005700 in the subject heading of your email. Then go tell all your friends that they should jump ship and come with you to Yahoo!

Received: 17-Dec-04

Top