Sr. User Researcher, Developer Experience

About Skillz:

Skillz is the leading mobile games platform connecting players in fair, fun, and meaningful competition. 

The gaming industry is larger than movies, music, and books, with more than 2.7 billion gamers playing monthly and 10 million developers worldwide. Mobile is the fastest-growing segment of the gaming market, expected to increase from $86 billion last year to $161 billion in 2025. 

As the first publicly-traded (NYSE: SKLZ) mobile esports platform, Skillz has pioneered the future of the gaming industry. The Skillz platform helps developers build multi-million dollar franchises by enabling social competition in their games. Leveraging its patented technology, Skillz hosts billions of casual esports tournaments for millions of mobile players worldwide, and distributes millions in prizes each month.

Through its philanthropic initiatives, Skillz has harnessed the power of its platform to transform the way nonprofits engage with donors, enabling anyone with a mobile device to support causes such as the American Red Cross, Susan G. Komen, American Cancer Society, and NAACP by playing in Skillz tournaments.

Skillz has also earned recognition as one of San Francisco Business Times’ Best Places to Work, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, Parity.org’s Best Companies for Women to Advance, a two-time winner of CNBC’s Disruptor 50, one of Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups, and the #1 fastest-growing company in America on the Inc. 5000.

Who we're looking for:

We are looking for an experienced Senior User Researcher with a formalized background in HCI or Cognitive Science to help us more deeply understand and empathize with game developers. You have an insatiable curiosity and passion for understanding human behavior, wants/needs, motivations and attitudes.  You’re adept at leveraging the right combination of generative, evaluative, quantitative, and qualitative methods to help answer big and messy questions.  As well as an analytical eye and attention to detail as you pour into your observations to uncover and clearly communicate hidden insights, and working with your team to prioritize improvements.

 What You'll Do:

• Partner with and educate Product, Design, Marketing, Engineering, and Analytics teams to use actionable insights and recommendations to make data-informed decisions and improvements
• Create appropriate benchmarking of metrics (i.e. NPS, CSAT, SUPRQ, SEQ, etc.)
• Identify and recommend the best methods to answer research questions and prioritize them according to schedule and opportunity constraints
• Determine where research should focus on, based on business objectives and knowledge gaps
• Actively find opportunities to improve the overall user experience
• Consolidate research findings into a concise, meaningful story for design and product teams
• Develop and maintain research repository
• Partner with Customer Success/Support teams to create client feedback loops
• Present your methods and rationale to peers, team partners, product partners, and design leadership
• Estimate work effort and define what you need to deliver

Tactical/Project Contributions:

• Identify and conduct best method or mix-methods research activities (usability testing, user interviews, ethnographic research, contextual inquiry, surveys, etc.)
• Gather research requirements (stakeholder interviews, workshops, etc.)
• Develop research plans (includes objectives, methodology, participants, guide/script/tasks/questions/survey/etc., timeline and responsibilities)
• Create moderated and unmoderated guide/script/tasks/questions/survey/etc.
• Recruit and schedule research participants
• Analysis and synthesis of data
• Shareout of results; follow-ups/meetings to ensure data and findings are used appropriately

Who you are:

• Self-motivated, excellent organizational skills, and multitasking skills
• Years of experience with a mix of generative, evaluative, quantitative, and qualitative research methods 
• More than 3-5 years professional experience, with proven success working with product teams and UX designers on product platform experiences

• BS degree in Social Sciences, HCI, Cognitive Psychology or similar areas or equivalent work experience (Master’s degree is a plus)

• Deep practical experience that leverages various research methods
• Advanced ability to articulate and visualize both qualitative and qualitative results
• Experience working firsthand with design and product teams
• Ability to develop creative, flexible and rapid approaches to user experience problems

Skillz embraces diversity and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. As part of our commitment to diversifying our workforce, we do not discriminate on the basis of age, race, sex, gender, gender identity, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, marital status, citizenship, veteran status, or disability status, and we operate in compliance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.