PA Consulting is an innovation and transformation consultancy that believes in the power of ingenuity to build a positive human future in a technology-driven world. Our diverse teams of experts combine innovative thinking and breakthrough use of technologies to progress further, faster. 

Essential Design is a multidisciplinary design, development, and innovation studio based in Boston, MA. We bring human insight to client teams and develop physical products, digital experiences, and new services. Our clients are agents of change at the world’s leading brands in consumer, tech, healthcare, and industrial sectors. Founded in 2000, Essential Design is based in Fort Point Channel, adjacent to the Seaport District and the heart of Boston’s Innovation Economy.

As of 2018, Essential is now part of PA Consulting, a 3500-person, UK-based global innovation and transformation organization with expertise in technology development, applied science, manufacturing and supply chain, business strategy, and other skills and domains complementary to Essential’s. The PA global organization now includes Astro, Cooper Perkins, Sparkler, and other leading design and insights studios across the globe. Together, Essential, PA, and PA’s studio network tackle large, ambitious, end-to-end strategy, design, development, and implementation challenges, by harnessing the skills and creativity of distributed teams around the globe.

Your day to day 

As a Design Researcher in our Innovation Strategy team, you’ll work in a studio environment to practice design thinking through inventive data gathering, thoughtful analysis, and insightful recommendations.

This individual will work closely amongst other researchers, product designers, engineers, and UX designers, as well as client teams to engage user populations (business or consumer based) in creative problem-solving. With a passion for what makes people tick through applied anthropology, you will work with diverse teams to elicit user goals and interpret unmet needs through mixed methods research. Collaborating with team members, you will define problems, characterize opportunities, visualize future scenarios, and help develop compelling products and services.

This role requires the ability to develop and support original research programs including project scoping, implementation, analysis, and delivery of meaningful outcomes to project teams. Program goals range from front-end exploratory research, to helping set strategic design direction, to concept and viability testing.

General Responsibilities:

·       Support and lead project teams through the human-centered design process (discovery, synthesis, ideation, design, and testing of new product and service concepts)

·       Involve and collaborate with customers along the innovation journey through field studies, workshops, and presentations

·       Identify research goals, develop study plans, protocols and test stimuli

·       Develop research plans, co-creation toolkits, workshop activities and coordinate research tasks (recruitment, vendor negotiations, logistics)

·       Perform data gathering in dedicated facilities or contexts of use, from homes to hospitals to businesses)

·       Organize raw information for in-depth analysis, translating findings into goal-directed, value-driven insights

·       Analyze and structure primary data (tagging, coding field data and video) to build descriptive frameworks

·       Characterize and recommend new, human-centered opportunities for business growth

·       Synthesize findings, authoring verbal+visual presentations

·       Interact with client team stakeholders, collaborate with other capability areas, advocate for end users

·       Present and defend program deliverables including design implications

The Candidate:

·       You have a working understanding for, or eagerness to adopt, design thinking methods and tools

·       You are comfortable interacting with diverse, multi-functional teams and are confident participating in ethnographic studies, workshops, and team meetings

·       You enjoy secondary research, able to spot macro- and micro-patterns upon close inspection

·       You are able to navigate unstructured bodies of qualitative information, see patterns, themes, and/or knowledge gaps, and identify new questions among user, market, industry, and technical dynamics

·       You are able to convey complex questions and learnings succinctly, striving to find the ‘narrative’ or story encompassing a new body of knowledge

·       You consider customer experiences as omni-channel ecosystems: physical artifacts, environments, digital interactions, services, etc.

·       Your visual design /communication design skills enable you to craft compelling visual stories to create custom frameworks and prototypes.

What you bring

Basic Qualifications

·       Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university

·       degree in social or cognitive sciences a plus

·       0-3 years professional experience in applied research (qual or quant)

Preferred Qualifications

·       Demonstrated experience with qualitative research methods and analysis

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.