Co-op Digital Blog

We’re recruiting user researchers.

If you want to help digital teams build the right thing, and if learning about how people behave and why sounds interesting, you might be a good fit. Have a look our job description for more details.

Our user research team come from really varied backgrounds. Here’s Vicki’s story.

(Transcript) Vicki Riley: I’ve been a user researcher for just coming up to a year now, I’ve been at the Co-op for 2 years. Originally I worked on the analytics and optimisation team. That involved looking at the the data so Google Analytics to find out what people were doing on our websites. But being a user research now I can really delve into why people are behaving in a certain way and shape the products that we’re building based on that.

User research is about understanding the behaviour of people. So rather than asking people what they would do we would prefer to observe them. So with colleagues that could involve shadowing in-store, spend a day in the life of a colleague who works in one of our food stores to really get to the bottom of what they’re trying to do, what their pain points are and shape what we’re building based on what we’re seeing rather than just what we’re hearing.

A huge part of user research is kind of getting out of the building, going out to the places that our users are working or spending time. There are a lot of assumptions in Angel Square or in any business there are assumptions and without speaking to the people who use your services or use your products you’ll never really find out what’s happening, you’ll never really get to the bottom of it.

I love working with designers and interaction designers, content designers. They’re really involved in the research and they bring a different perspective to things. They have different backgrounds, different experiences, different knowledge so it
really helps to have a diverse group of people doing the research analysing the
research.

I’m learning something new pretty much every week because I’m working on different teams and moving around a lot learning from people who’ve done user research but 10, 20 years so for my personal development it’s been brilliant this last year I’ve learned more than I have in my entire career.

I’ve wanted to work at the Co-op for a long time ever since I’ve finished University. They’re a company that really makes a difference in the community and I think user research has an opportunity to shape that, to shape what we do in the future.

Vicki Riley
User researcher