User Experience (UX) Researcher

User Experience Researcher
NinjaTrader is an investor-backed, exciting growth stage FinTech company servicing hundreds of thousands of traders by providing award winning software and brokerage services. We are building products and services which empower active traders to easily analyze and react to data from the world's leading financial markets. Located in Chicago, our unique employee-centric company culture is one that our team finds inviting, comfortable and fun. We are currently accepting applications for a User Experience Researcher to join our growing team! Please visit www.ninjatrader.com to learn more about our business.
About You :
You are a self-motivated, critical thinker, with excellent verbal and written communication skills. You are a proven leader, ready to deliver business-critical solutions while passionately pursuing the best user experience possible. You will take the lead on UX research, documentation, planning, and strategy. You take an "always-learning" approach to staying current with the best practices and UX trends. You are motivated by the idea of making a measurable impact and like being the "go-to" person for all things UX.
You are a cross-functional leader-responsible for researching, understanding, and defining competitive and customer needs, utilizing a human-centered approach. You confidently and diligently manage the ongoing analysis of the user experience across the entire customer-facing digital landscape. You effortlessly form a cohesive and inclusive bridge between users, design, and product development teams to deliver a class-leading user experience.
In this role, you will:

• Collaborate with colleagues and key stakeholders in a team environment
• Conduct a wide array of in-depth user experience research and reporting through a variety of methods (e.g. interviews, A/B and user testing, competitive and best-in-class research, behavior tracking tools, etc.)
• Work closely with CX and Marketing Analytics Strategists to research customers, and UX Designers to plan and build our products and tools

• Understand business goals and customer needs, and combine with UX best practices to benefit both

• Stay up to date on UX trends

You will also :

• Create, conduct, review, and summarize user stories, user personae, user flows, storyboards, and other user experience planning activities to ensure that objectives, goals, and requirements are clear, and led by user research
• Identify, communicate, and prioritize high-impact research questions and opportunities, while continuing to drive strategic design and feature decisions
• Combine user and competitive research with business data and UX best practices to help shape product roadmaps, and to define design needs and future research activities
• Use storytelling to communicate high-level concepts and research insights in presentations, reports, and workshops
• Evaluate and measure the outcomes for each design/build segment to provide recommendations on how best to improve the overall product design in an iterative and ongoing process
• Wireframe to demonstrate how the user and business needs can be met through design
• Collaborate with and help guide other project stakeholders on UX-affected activities such as branding, web and platform design and development, research, etc.
• Plan and conduct UX workshops for key stakeholders and customers-lay the groundwork for and help define and guide the journey of new products and projects
• Work collaboratively and respectfully within a cross-functional team and across all areas of the company, taking into account all aspects of the business process and user journey, and working with respect to various team needs
• Other user-centric tasks to assist various NinjaTrader teams as needed. (e.g. QA testing)
• Help define and develop the next-generation customer experience at NinjaTrader

Job Requirements :

• BA or MS degree in a related field or relevant years of experience
• 3-5 years of UX strategy experience
• Business analysis and/or UX design experience is a plus
• Proficiency in wireframing/prototyping tools such as Figma, Sketch, Axure, InVision, XD, etc.
• Must possess a strong understanding of user experience and user centered design-wireframes, personae, user flows, user stories, user journeys, etc.
• Must be self-motivated and able to easily execute without ample direction-with a proven record of successfully leading project UX from concept to completion
• Must effectively manage workloads to meet deliverables within agreed timeframes
• Must be detail-oriented, with the ability to think critically and efficiently multitask
• Must be comfortable with and professional when working directly with customers
• Must be confident in presenting work to senior-level executives, team members, and internal stakeholders-answering questions and articulating information to the rest of the team
• Must be open to constructive criticism
• Must be able to learn and adapt quickly

Compensation and Benefits:

• Competitive salary
• Annual target bonus
• Comprehensive benefits package (medical, dental, vision, life insurance)
• 401K with company match
• 15 days paid time off per year
• 7 paid holidays annually
• Hybrid Work Environment*
• Business casual work environment
• Ongoing training and support

*Upon completion of training, our team works 3 days per week (Tuesday thru Thursday) from our Chicago Loop location.