The Company:

Bloomberg, the global business and financial information and news leader, gives influential decision makers a critical edge by connecting them to a dynamic network of information, people and ideas. The company's strength - delivering data, news and analytics through innovative technology, quickly and accurately - is at the core of the Bloomberg Professional service, which provides real time financial information to more than 300,000 subscribers globally. Bloomberg's enterprise solutions build on the company's core strength, leveraging technology to allow customers to access, integrate, distribute and manage data and information across organizations more efficiently and effectively. Through Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Government and Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the company provides data, news and analytics to decision makers in industries beyond finance. And Bloomberg News, delivered through television, radio, mobile, the Internet and two magazines, Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg Markets, covers the world with more than 2,300 news and multimedia professionals at 146 bureaus in 72 countries. Headquartered in New York, Bloomberg employs more than 13,000 people in 185 locations around the world.

The Role

Bloomberg's CTO Office User Experience group is expanding and looking for an experienced, self-motivated Usability Analyst practitioner with expertise in complex software products and business systems.

We are looking for a multi-disciplinary team player who can quickly learn our organization's needs and culture and take responsibility for leading qualitative customer research initiatives that assist our team in making critical design decisions regarding current and future Bloomberg products. The ideal candidate is driven by the desire to be a customer advocate, and passionate about creating user experiences that are intuitive, satisfying, and easy to learn and interact with by implementing customer-centered research and design methods.

The User Experience professionals at Bloomberg form a core team that serve as a consulting resource for the highest-visibility business application and platform projects. The Usability Analyst will collaborate closely with other Usability Analysts, UX Designers, product and technical managers, graphic designers, technical writers, programmers, and end users. The candidate in this dedicated role will be hands-on with all tactical activities for planning, executing, and analyzing user research initiatives in a fast-paced environment, can evangelize the value of user research and UX activities, and provide strategic direction and leadership on incorporating user research methodologies into the design and development lifecycle.

The candidate should be able to quickly synthesize business objectives and customer needs, identify and articulate potential usability issues, provide support for prioritization, and clearly communicate recommendations and potential design solutions. This is not a design role, but experience or familiarity with interaction design tools and techniques is a plus. The Usability Analyst may work in tandem with another Usability Analyst, or work solo to plan, recruit, script, facilitate, collect and analyze usability data, document results, transform the data into actionable recommendations, and develop persuasive presentations to product owners, developers, visual designers, and c-level executives.

This is a very visible, customer facing role, and so it is important that the candidate has a professional, confident, and polished demeanor, is outgoing and articulate, and can easily adapt to new situations, people, and environments. This is a unique opportunity to influence one of the most ubiquitous and influential software products in the marketplace. Although this is not a management role, this position will directly report into Bloomberg's CTO Office.

The candidate should have a track record of applying common User-Centered Design practices and tools to solve tough design problems. Experience with design or research projects involving complex workflows, visualization of large datasets, or operating system-level tools will be a plus. Methodologies should include expertise in usability testing, rapid iterative testing, qualitative and quantitative data analysis, eye tracking, persona development, heuristic evaluations, a/b testing, analytics, survey evaluation, card sorting, ethnography/contextual inquiry, remote usability testing, and other UCD methods.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor of Science/Master of Science in Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, Human Factors, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, or related field
• 5 to 10+ years of experience applying research to interactive design, prototyping, and product development for preferably high-volume B2B AND B2C desktop applications, rich Web-based applications, or platform-level tools
• Strong, analytical problem solving, decision-making, and leadership skills
• In-depth understanding of user-centered design principles and tools
• Working knowledge with data-logging tools and systems such as Ovo Studios, Morae, Camtasia, or similar
• Familiarity with wire-framing and prototyping tools such as Visio/OmniGraffle, Flash/Flex, Blend/WPF, Director, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, etc is a plus
• Familiarity with design tools such as Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.