hFIDO Blog

Position Summary

Our Boston Office is looking for a Human Factors (HF) Specialist or Design Researcher. The role involves collaborating with interdisciplinary teams and with our clients to create innovative products, services, spaces, interactions and experiences. Human Factors researchers play a key role in the IDEO process by leading the team through the user research, which uncovers the insights that both inform and inspire design and innovation.

We are looking for…

Individuals who are naturally empathetic and passionate about people – We look for those who have a natural skill to engage with people at a deep level. They should be passionate about representing a human and humane perspective and should have skills in bringing this passion to life for the internal design team, and client organization. 

Key Activities

• User research/fieldwork skills – HF team members must be prepared to plan and lead user research to discover insights first hand. We are looking for people who can keep up a high degree of rigor throughout, but also can be innovative and experimental in their approach and methodology. Numerous examples of contextual inquiries and other qualitative methods leveraged across various domains is integral.
• Deep insights – Applicants must have deep insights that help the team read between the lines and discover latent needs.
• Ability to lead synthesis – HF specialists must be able to lead the team and often the clients through the analysis and synthesis processes, helping to distill the most important insights and linking them together in frameworks or principles for design.
• Ability to connect insights to design -The insights and information drawn from research must be translated into an inspirational and useful foundation for design.
• Strategic perspective – In the variety of work that we do, many of our projects involve HF leads in strategic thinking based upon the insights gathered from the field. Business, brand, systems and/or strategic skills are desirable.
• Flexible and efficient – Our projects are fast-paced, and the HF specialist should be comfortable exercising a balance between design and inspiration bias, and academic research rigor, in order to move quickly from research planning, to conducting the field work, to synthesizing insights to recommending design directions and opportunities.

Additional Skills Required

Please submit, in addition to your resume, examples of your work. Please do not upload text only versions of your work. It is helpful to see how you communicate with design teams. For example, please send: a portfolio

OR

a description of a project in which you had the chance to develop your field-based discoveries to the point of design outcomes or actionable design principles.