Lead User Researcher

Profile

The Position
Lending Tree was built to help consumers make informed financial decisions. With this as our passion, it is essential that we bring the consumer voice to the table to advise and guide our future business strategy. The person in this role needs to be passionate about helping people reach financial independence and have deep empathy for users at every step in their financial journey. We are looking for an experienced user research leader with the confidence to both direct strategic initiatives and lead day-to-day research activities to gather user insights, then use these insights to develop data-driven product decisions and UX designs. The ideal candidate will be excited at the challenge of transforming organizational attitudes and perceptions about our users and the problems they need help solving. This role would impact all current and future products, focusing mostly on the authenticated experience driving our platform, My LendingTree. This person would need to be able to prioritize where user research needs to happen and how to scale the user research practice. This may include training other team members, working with agencies, and hiring additional resources when necessary. The prime candidate can proactively recognize opportunities to improve the user experience of our products and services, then lead initiatives to urgently bring those improvements to market. This role also requires an effective communicator, an expert problem solver, and an end-to-end tactical whiz. If this feels like you, we encourage you to read on.
Essential Functions of the Role
Be the voice of the user by developing an in-depth and accurate understanding of our users and the problems they are trying to solve, and then use that knowledge to help drive a better experience for our users.
Lead foundational and evaluative user research initiatives across all our products, especially through the authenticated user experience on our platform, My LendingTree.
Proactively partner with colleagues to identify research opportunities, communicate insights, and cross-train team members as appropriate.
Maintain relationships with agencies and contracts with user research platforms, including recommending changes based on business need.
Define overall user research strategy for LendingTree products and communicate outcomes and insights to product and executive leadership.
When possible, provide a quantifiable return-on-investment for practicing user-centered design and user research at LendingTree.
Collaborate daily with interaction designers to rapidly iterate and validate wireframes and prototypes, then share impactful recommendations for improvement.
Help partners understand how users succeed and fail using our products as well as specific opportunities for improvement.
Clearly identify and articulate the user problem independent of any proposed solutions to improve the focus of the team.
Sell your user research proposals and methods to internal stakeholders through storytelling, data-based visualizations, and evidence-based research principles.
Required Skills and Experience
M.S. or Ph.D. in Human Factors and Ergonomics, Cognitive Psychology, or Human-Computer Interaction with 8 years (4 years with Ph.D.) of experience as a user researcher, including 4 years (2 years with Ph.D.) in a team lead, staff, principal, or specialist role (with or without direct reports), functioning as an advocate or guide
Demonstrable experience using both quant and qual research methods applicable to financial web and mobile apps. Equally comfortable analyzing results from usability tests and facilitating live user interviews as you are conducting a remote long-term user research study or crafting an organizational training for team members.
Desire for autonomy and to grow the practice. Willing to put in the time and effort vital to get consensus and prove out business value.
Passionate about putting our end users at the center of the business and everything you do.
Self-motivated and proactive. Comfortable with ambiguity and independence. Hungry to get stuff done and break through walls.
Highly effective and flexible communicator for a diverse group of associates and leadership, from designers and engineers to product owners and executives.
Effectively projects professionalism, confidence, and a steadfast, positive “can-do” demeanor.
Capable of defining and institutionalizing usability and consumer experience metrics, helping establish user-centered thinking as part of the culture at LendingTree.
Inventorying and maintaining our repository of user insights from past research.
Company
LendingTree is the nation’s largest online lending marketplace. That means we connect customers with multiple lenders, so they find the best deals on loans, credit cards, savings accounts and insurance. Our goal is to help people save money, and we believe the best way to do that is by giving them a way to shop for loans and compare lenders, so they make their best financial choices.
Our CEO Doug Lebda founded the company in 1996 after a frustrating house-hunting experience. In those days, we mostly helped people find good mortgage deals. Now, we help consumers find their best in personal loans, auto loans, business loans, student loans, credit cards, savings accounts, home equity loans and more.
What else you should know
We’re a publicly-traded company (TREE).
We’ve welcomed several other companies into the LendingTree family to augment our efforts at helping borrowers make their most sensible financial choices.
We’ve built the LendingTree app and My LendingTree dashboard to give consumers tools to manage and monitor their financial health.
Culture
We’re a fast-paced company with an entrepreneurial bend. We work hard and test our products often. We’re collaborative, ambitious, candid and high-energy. Our teammates are some of the brightest, most talented people you’ll ever work with. We care more about your smarts than we do about the kinds of clothes you wear (but please, do wear clothes to work!), and we’re pretty good about rewarding innovation, creativity and the knack for just getting stuff done (we even have an award for employees called the GSD, “Get Stuff Done”).
Come work with us!
LendingTree is the kind of company that not only promotes diversity and inclusion; we thrive because of these values. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion (or creed), gender, gender expression, age, national origin, disability, marital status, sexual orientation or military status.

Company info

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