User Experience Designer / Researcher

Abingdon, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

Company Description

Informa is a leading academic publishing, business intelligence, knowledge and events business, creating unique content and connectivity for customers all over the world. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a member of the FTSE 100.

Taylor & Francis Group produces high quality, peer reviewed books and journals. We produce unique, trusted content by expert authors, spreading knowledge and promoting discovery globally. We aim to broaden thinking and advance understanding, providing academics and professionals with a platform to share ideas and realise their individual potential.

Job Description

Overall Role Summary:

User experience (UX) is at the forefront of how we create intuitive, innovative and successful products for global customers. User Experience Designers and Researchers strive to learn and understand our users’ needs and behaviours and to design experiences that bring exceptional form and function to products for both researchers and learners. In this role you will work on both existing and new products with a strong emphasis on creating solutions that delight users while increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of processes and products for Taylor & Francis Group. A strong orientation toward customer research user centric design will be critical, as well as an ability to effectively collaborate across boundaries in a rapidly evolving matrixed organization of product leaders, marketers, data analysts, engineers, and editorial teams.

Key Accountabilities:

• Conduct qualitative and quantitative research and develop a deep understanding of existing and optimized research, teaching, and/or learning workflows. Conduct usability and user understanding studies through in field surveys, interviews and data analysis. 
• Collaborate with colleagues throughout the business to ensure the right customer groups are targeted for research, including a broad and diverse range of global customers. 
• Develop and maintain personas that are used across business.
• Conduct usability studies through in field surveys, interviews or data analysis. 
• Partner with product and technology teams to ensure delivery of user experiences in a manner that is on-time, within budget, and of sufficient quality to meet or exceed internal/external expectations, which includes sharing research findings and representing the “voice of the user” to help inform product decisions.
• Working with product management, apply user-centric design methods and tools to research findings to best align end-user needs with product experiences; develop user-centric experiences for existing and new products of superior value to clients.

Represent the use in assigned product development teams; deliver appropriate UX tasks working as member of lean/agile/etc team

Qualifications 

• Demonstrated history of participation in user-centric product development, assisting product management in the creation of commercially successful new products, as well as effectively revitalizing existing products
• Demonstrated experience in conducting UX research in an applied research setting. Including drafting discussion guides; recruiting respondents; organising test venues and mobilising resources; interviewing; and moderating focus groups and usability (lab) test sessions.
• Demonstrated history of UX research and design in developing streamlined and intuitive interfaces in the context of complex workflows through the application of user-centric design philosophies and interaction design best practices 
• Experience with international research and design, including leading field research studies globally and often in emerging markets.
• Experience working with product and user analytics to derive user insights and influence product development decisions
• Demonstrated expert-level proficiency with current design and prototyping tools
• Knowledge of publishing, learning, or related information service markets a plus
• Experience in academic research, digital education a plus    
• Knowledge of accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.0, Section 508) a plus

Skills and Behaviours Required

• Possess expert-level proficiency in key UX research / design tasks:
  • Knowledge of strengths and shortcomings of different research methods, including when and how to apply them during each product phase.
  • Experience with survey design and survey analysis
  • Passion for and deep understanding of user-centred design principles
  • Ability to translate UX research into impactful UX designs
• Address opportunities and challenges through user-centric solutions guided by evidence-based and data-driven decision-making
• Have strong organisation and planning skills; ability to manage multiple UX projects in parallel
• Demonstrate passion, creativity, problem solving, and critical thinking in your work
• Employ excellent organizational, analytical, and planning skills with good attention to detail
• Provide effective and clear verbal and written communication
• Act as a good listen, team player, and willing collaborator at all times

 Additional Information

What we offer in return:

At Taylor & Francis we care about our colleagues, promoting work-life balance, wellbeing, and flexible working. You will be joining a thriving business, working alongside an exceptional group of people. We believe that the skills and experience you bring to Taylor & Francis are invaluable. We want you to have the opportunity to develop your abilities, and to innovate and develop in areas which you are passionate about.

• 25 days annual leave
• 4 volunteering days annually
• Day off for your birthday
• Pension contributions
• Seasonal social and charitable events
• Training and development

Training And Professional Development:

We’re passionate about ensuring you have all the tools and resources at your fingertips to reach your short and long-term career goals. We’ll support you in your journey by working together on your own bespoke Taylor & Francis Development Plan, ensuring you have the resources, tools, support and coaching that will get you where you want to be.

Interview process:

Once you have submitted your application, we may get in touch with you for an initial screening conversation or ask you to complete a short video interview to enable us to better understand your skills, experience, and motivation. Following this, you will be invited to attend a competency-based interview, either virtually or in person. Typically, we’d then finish the interview process with a final, 2nd stage interview before extending an offer to the successful applicant.

Being Yourself at Taylor & Francis

 If you’re excited about working with Taylor & Francis to foster human progress through knowledge, we invite you to apply even if your existing skills and experience don’t fit every item listed above. At Taylor & Francis, we are at our best and most successful when colleagues can be themselves and make a contribution regardless of their identity or background. As a colleague, you will have the opportunity to further innovate and develop in areas that you are passionate about. Our goal is to empower you with the resources, incentives, and flexibility you need to enjoy success at work and to live a healthy, balanced life.

Taylor & Francis is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We believe in and value diversity of people and thought, fostering a supportive and inclusive environment where all colleagues can learn and succeed as their true selves. Taylor & Francis recruits, develops, and retains colleagues without regard to any protected personal characteristics or other non-merit based factor.

We genuinely care about our colleagues, promoting work-life balance, wellbeing, and flexible working. We believe that the skills and experience you bring to Taylor & Francis are invaluable. We want you to have the opportunity to develop your abilities, and to innovate and develop in areas which you are passionate about.

Or better yet check out our LinkedIn ‘Life’ Page, highlighting our accomplishments, employees, and company culture. It’s also a good way of meeting our recruitment team, who will be happy to advise you on your journey here at T&F.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/taylor-&-francis-group/life/79e0c27c-afdf-4bbb-84e6-5f8ed5e10bb8/

Head of Continuous Improvement and Services

COMPANY DESCRIPTION

Informa is a leading academic publishing, business intelligence, knowledge and events business, creating unique content and connectivity for customers all over the world. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a member of the FTSE 100.

Taylor & Francis is one of the world’s leading publishers of scholarly journals, books, eBooks and reference works. We are creating technology platforms to shape the future of knowledge.  

Taylor & Francis Group produces high quality, peer reviewed books and journals. We produce unique, trusted content by expert authors, spreading knowledge and promoting discovery globally. We aim to broaden thinking and advance understanding, providing academics and professionals with a platform to share ideas and realise their individual potential. 

As part of Taylor & Francis’s digital first strategy, we have been driving growth through providing access to publications through digital platforms and providing a unified experience across the body of content. We have created digital platforms to facilitate discovery and to allow users to access relevant research and information quickly and easily, wherever they are.  

CONTEXT OF ROLE

We are looking to add a talented and self-motivated Head of Continuous Improvement and Services, reporting into the Director of Digital Sales and Delivery Channels. This role will have overall responsibility for the creation and ongoing development of CI and release processes, as well as a new common service layer to provide modern separation of concerns between UX, business logic and external API calls.  

The Digital Sales and Delivery Channels is focused on all systems which interact with customers, but not our core company systems (Identity, ERP, etc.)  

As T&F matures from a technology out-sourcer to an in-sourcer we need to develop our capability in relation to the build and deployment of software to cloud (AWS at time of writing). While we have some excellent products we have no consistent mechanism to build and deploy them, and a lack of consistency and reporting around the testing and deployment of those products. This leads to drag, and an inability to scale our engineering output. 

Part of the strategy being implemented to address is will provide a specific Continual Improvement Team in each key platform area, which will work together on common outcomes and goals to reach a more consistent landscape in terms of test, deployment, support and reporting. These people will remain working with their teams, but will be entirely focused on agreed areas of improvements. 

Additionally, areas of business logic must, where they are not already, be wrapped up in Microservices, which can also then be deployed using the new CI pipelines. 

This role will oversee both of these areas, provide technical and strategic direction, and help deliver the new strategy. 

Taylor & Francis is building the world's leading platform connecting the network of human knowledge.  We are passionate about helping researchers achieve their goals, which in turn adds new nodes to the ever-expanding graph of research information.  We believe that researchers are our number one priority, so we work hard to deliver value back to them with everything we do. 

JOB DESCRIPTION

• Providing strategy and practical examples of best practise to drive and improve our deployment pipelines 
• Technically ensuring that our test and deployment pipelines are optimised for rapid and high quality delivery, taking steps to continually improve them 
• Ensuring the design of the Application Service Layer is consistent with wider engineering principles, and best practise, providing guidance where required 

What we’re looking for: 

• Owning the technical strategy and working closely with architecture and other disciplines on various projects across multiple teams and disciplines 
• Track record of building and running successful engineering teams with passion for Technology and able to spread enthusiasm to all teams. 
• Ownership and leadership of Multiple end-to-end deliveries, making sure the design and build governance are adhered to across all teams 
• Strong communication and influencing skills, experienced at creating relationships at all levels across T&F 
• Leadership and people management skills 
• Develop and manage multi-year platform roadmap in collaboration with the product teams 
• Manage relationships with 3rd party suppliers to ensure consistent delivery. 
• Accountable for delivery of critical components 
• Establishes High quality testing rigor to enable high quality product and service deliverables, supportability, and customer experiences.   

QUALIFICATIONS

Desirable Skills/Behaviours: 

• Ownership and leadership to help teams to arrive at technical solutions. 
• Support and prioritise work on R&D and significant concentration on NFR’s and support in saving money. 
• Promote innovation and provide a safe space for new technical solutions 
• Strong interpersonal, presentation and negotiating skills to quickly establish rapport and credibility at all levels within an organization. 
• Excellent communication, and problem-solving skills; sound business acumen and an executive presence. 
• Exposure to the publishing domain or experience within a similar domain 
• Ability to multitask in a dynamic environment 
• Detailed technical understanding of DevOps and CloudOps technologies, particularly with AWS 

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

What we offer in return:   

• 24 days annual leave 

• 4 volunteering days annually 
• Day off for your birthday 
• Pension contributions 
• Medical insurance for self and dependants; life cover and personal accident cover for self 
• Seasonal social and charitable events 

• Training and development 
• Remote Working 
• Right tools for remote working 

Additional Information:   

You must have the right to work and live in the UK. This role is based at home, with frequent travel to Oxford and occasional travel to Bangalore, India.