The Opportunity:

Shutterstock is a technology company that powers one of the world’s largest marketplaces for high-quality photos, illustrations, videos and music used by businesses, marketing agencies and media organizations of all sizes.

Shutterstock is made up of independent thinkers, technologists, and designers – working collaboratively to do compelling work, create cool stuff, and inspire each other. In the process, we’re building sophisticated tools to help the world experience images, footage, and music in a more beautiful way.

Because we are a digital business, the Shutterstock Product Design team designs the business and all the customer and contributor experiences. We are responsive and know what our customers are doing and what platform they’re doing it on. We think globally and advocate for the individual. That means quantitative, qualitative and analytical research. It also means lots of collaboration with product owners and developers. And because we’re agile, we are quick on our feet and know how to iterate. But most of all we are compassionate - we want to solve problems and solve them with integrity.

As a Director, UX Research, you’ll be an important UX and Product leader at Shutterstock. We believe great products are built by deeply understanding our customers — who they are, what motivates them, why they behave the way they do, and what they think of our brand, our products, and our competitors. You’ll lead the UX research strategy and operations to support research as a regular practice throughout the product development cycle. Achieving this goal requires close collaboration with Designers, Directors, VPs, and other stakeholders throughout the organization.

Responsibilities:

The Director, UX Research will establish and drive the overall UX research strategy across the Product organization and Shutterstock platform. This is a senior-level role with significant responsibility, creativity, expertise, and business sense required.

• Drive the operational research strategy, owning and evolving a holistic research process throughout the organization that spans the end-to-end customer and contributor journeys
• Understand stakeholder research needs and identify the right research methodologies to address them
• Fully execute research projects from initial kick-off to fielding/interviewing to sharing findings as a primary researcher
• Evolve and maintain the UX Research Ops strategy to help guide teams when conducting generative (ethnographic) and evaluative (usability testing) research studies
• Oversee the Usability Lab, scheduling, and coordination of user interviews to collect user insights
• Develop UX Research artifacts including proposals, moderator’s guides, and results summaries
• Recruit and maintain lists of targeted research participants from internal and external sources
• Maintain close partnership with Market Research and Product teams to support research efforts, identify needs, gather business requirements, and maintain a central research repository
• Lead and influence teams through generating actionable insights that both fuel ideation and evaluate designs, while juggling multiple projects with dependencies on internal teams
• Identify unmet research opportunities that can add value and efficiently execute them
• Serve as the voice of the customer and act as a customer experience advocate who is passionate about observing and understanding our users
• Apply and further develop your experience in developing new approaches to qualitative research based on industry best practices
• Evangelize research internally and externally to diverse audiences

Requirements:

• 8 + years of experience leading teams showing strong domain expertise conducting formal product research
• MA/MS Degree in HCI, Psychology, Social Science, Interaction Design, Statistics or related field of study (or work experience in lieu of degree)
• Mastery of research tools (Qualtrics, Usertesting.com)
• Expertise in a diverse set of qualitative and user-centered research methods
• Deep knowledge and experience running qualitative research methodologies used throughout each stage of the product development cycle (i.e. Ethnographic Studies, Moderated 1:1 Interviews, Focus Groups, Competitive Analysis, Benchmark studies, etc.)
• Familiar with quantitative research methods and ability to integrate quantitative data with user research
• Basic knowledge of statistics and data analysis
• Comfort operating autonomously with strong experience creating personas and synthesizing research findings elegantly and efficiently
• Enthusiasm in ambiguity and uncertainty
• Willingness to challenge the status quo when it comes to addressing the needs of users
• Excellent listening, speaking and writing skills to articulate your decisions and research process
• You are respectful when challenging assumptions and give and receive feedback with equal grace
• You enjoy working with a great group of people, who genuinely care about product research and each other

About Shutterstock:

Shutterstock, a global technology company, has created the largest and most vibrant two-sided marketplace for creative professionals to license content - including images, videos, and music - as well as innovative tools that power the creative process.

The company has expanded its portfolio to include Bigstock, a value-oriented stock media agency; PremiumBeat, a curated royalty-free music library; Rex Features, a premier source of editorial images for the world's media; and Webdam, a cloud-based digital asset management platform for businesses, as well as Offset, a high-end image collection.

For more information, please visit www.shutterstock.com, follow Shutterstock on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Equal Opportunity Employer, M/F/D/V