Principal Experience Researcher

Position Overview

The Principal User Experience Researcher at Autodesk is a relentless customer and user advocate, possesses a passion for human-centered design, and a journey-centric way of collaborating with cross-functional partners.

Our Experience Researchers leverage a variety of research methods and work in lockstep with their teams to envision, validate, and ship high-quality experiences our customers will love. Our researchers embody a continued improvement mindset and apply a journey management framework to track experiences over time. In a distributed organization model, they form strong and lasting partnerships to exchange insights with research and analytics groups across the organization.

Reporting to the Manager of Experience Insights, the Principal User Experience Researcher will join a top-notch research team and will conduct research on our digital-first customer touchpoints. The role will require sharp research skills, along with a strategic mindset and the ability to collaborate with different product teams.

The role requires rigor around research roadmap planning, speed in execution, and a relentless curiosity to experiment with and operationalize AI-integrated workflows.

Responsibilities

• Proactively planning and executing discovery research throughout the design and development lifecycle, from early strategic direction through post-release validation
• Integrating and synthesizing complex data from diverse sources.
• Employing a wide range of research methods, including formative and summative usability studies, customer interviews and contextual inquiry, and quantitative methods such as A/B testing, multi-variant testing, customer surveys and usage analytics.
• Analyzing insights for business impact
• Communicating and presenting research findings and insights in a clear and compelling way to a variety of audiences, including executive audience
• Collaborating in our Journey Management platform to connect insights with user journeys and resulting recommendations, drive strategic decision making and prioritization based on insights
• Facilitating empathy and synthesis workshops with project teams and stakeholders to ensure that findings and insights are translated into actionable product improvements
• Lead efforts in AI-assisted research, leveraging generative AI tools at every step of the research and Journey Management process
• Partnering with other researchers on our team and with the broader research community at Autodesk to share and evangelize research findings, collaborate on projects to understand our customers’ end-to-end journey, and to promote research as a strategic driver for our products and services
• Acting beyond just a practitioner of research, and taking responsibility to be an activator of research: making sure research insights turn into industry-leading products and services
• Supporting an outcome-oriented model measuring the effectiveness of research against business impact

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional research experience
• Strong track record of qualitative and quantitative results impacting product strategy and development
• Extensive experience in strategic research planning and working at the intersection of business, technology, and human-centered design principles
• Up-to-date toolkit of research methods, and the experience and savvy to know when to be lean and scrappy and when to be rigorous
• Ability to collaborate with a wide set of stakeholders including designers, product managers, and software developers
• Ability to execute in a fast-paced, agile environment
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to distill complex ideas to their essence
• Demonstrated inquisitive mind and empathy for customers
• Experience in integrating AI tools into the research workflow
• Value for collaboration and bringing your team along with you
• Ability to think holistically and find patterns
• Eagerness to work in the complex and derive simple valuable solutions

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree or above in cognitive or experimental psychology, human computer interaction, human factors, or related field
• Experience researching multichannel experiences
• Familiarity with Lean UX and Lean Research methodologies
• Experience with agile software development
• Experience with Autodesk products