Senior User Researcher

Newcastle Upon Tyne, Tyne And Wear
Virgin Money

Job Title: Senior User Researcher
Business Unit: Brand & Marketing
Basic Salary £39,600 – £50,500 DOE
Location: Flexible
Contract Type: Fixed Term 6 months

In our quest to make things better, we never stop looking at how every bit of banking works. We sweat the small stuff, because we know it makes a big difference for our customers. But at the heart of this are our people – who we couldn’t do without. Our bold and brilliant colleagues who bring their A game every single day. The question is – are you ready to bring yours?

We’re on the search for a talented Senior User Researcher to focus on creating empathy from user’s perspective by providing understanding of users’ needs through surfacing insights about users’ behaviours. You’ll influence and educate stakeholders and the wider team on the user centered design process and the merits of investing in user research and its impact on the user experience.

Your research will help us create useful, usable, and delightful new products and features for people as well as continually innovating on our existing digital products and services.

We’re looking for straight talkers, the smart disrupters and the people that ask ‘why not?’ We welcome insatiable curiosity and relentless optimism to support us in delivering requirements whilst also helping to shape the future of the function. You’ll inspire change at all stages of product development by delivering compelling, written, in-person and visual presentations on your findings.

Details are critical to quality – the UX team iterate on complex interactions and flows – bringing stakeholders on the journey – ensuring customer needs are at the heart of decision making. Sound good? Read on…

Day to day you’ll­ be…

• Responsible for creating and leading a program of research as part of a multi-disciplinary and diverse in-house Digital Design team.
• Coordinating user research-based customer understanding and empathy activities across multiple projects an initiatives.
• Taking the lead, plan, and conduct research activities to uncover user needs, meet business goals and design requirements.
• Managing the end to end usability testing process from planning, recruitment through to delivery of insights to stakeholders.
• Creating a communication strategy to deliver research findings and insights to the team, senior stakeholders and directors so that they share a deep understanding of users’ needs and appreciate the design thinking process.
• Creating a variety of outputs and deliverables to communicate research findings.
• Conducting service level evaluations in order to understand the end to end user journey across all touch points to innovate and inform design strategy.
• Leading on creating a set of Digital UX personas using our customer understanding Persona framework.
• Ensuring ethical research practices and procedures are adhered to across all user research activities within your scope.

To be brilliant you must have …

• Substantive experience working within Digital user experience
• A degree qualified in psychology, behavioural sciences, Human Factors, HCI/Computer Science or other related UX / UCD / Service design fields or equivalent practical experience.
• Demonstrable experience of applying a wide range of user research methods
• Experience of confidently facilitating of design thinking workshops
• An expertise of user centred design principles and techniques
• Effective interpersonal, communication, and collaboration skills
• Knowledge of Inclusive design principles
• An advanced understand of using collaboration and research tools e.g. Marvel, Invision, Axure, Miro
• Experience of using remote user research platforms such as UserZoom, Userlytics, UserTesting.com or similar

It’s a bonus if you have (but not essential)…

• Experience with Sketch, Jira, Confluence
• Experience with Agile development process
• Knowledge of behavioural economics and choice architecture
• Experience in leveraging quantitative data such as analytics and data science
• Experience of using remote user testing platforms

We really need you to have the skills and experience listed in the To be brilliant you must have section above, but the rest is just our wish list, so please don’t let that put you off applying, we’d love to hear from you!

RED HOT Rewards

• A generous holiday package and the option to buy more!
• Private Medical Insurance – with the option to extend to family members.
• Pension! A market leading pension – we’ll top up your contributions too.
• Flexible benefits – customise your rewards to work for you!

Inclusion at Virgin Money

Inclusion is at the heart of everything we do here at Virgin Money. It’s good for you, it’s good for us and it’s amazing for our customers. We know that great minds don’t think alike, so we rely on your diverse thoughts, feelings, beliefs and backgrounds to be the best we can possibly be. Got any questions about this or need some support with your application? We’d love to hear from you so get in touch with our friendly team at or

Point to note…

At the minute, depending on which team you are joining, lots of us are working from home. This is something that may change over time, and if so, we will come together in one of our hub locations, giving you the chance to meet your new colleagues in person. We will of course, make sure you have the IT equipment to access our systems and to interact digitally with your new team and colleagues, but we thought it best to let you know this in advance, so you can make sure you are set up to work safely and productively. If you have any questions on this let us know!

Now the legal bit…

If we offer you a job and you accept, there are some checks we need to complete before you can start with us. This will include a credit and criminal record check, as well as providing 3 years’ worth of satisfactory references.