User Research Lead (Volunteer role)

Your Pride In London 

Pride in London means many things to many people, it belongs to our community and it belongs to you; come and join the conversation!

Pride in London has a renewed sense of purpose to highlight the challenges still facing the LGBT+ community today despite progress. We are run by a group of volunteers who are passionate about equality and diversity and are drawn from all walks of life. Pride aims to raise awareness of LGBT+ issues and campaign for the freedoms that will allow all of our community to live their lives on a genuinely equal footing. 

Around 250 people volunteer year-round to help us deliver what has become a world-class Pride. It is our intention for Pride in London to best represent all parts of our community and we continue to actively encourage applications from diverse backgrounds, particularly women, People of Colour and those from the trans and non-binary communities. All applications are important to us so if you’d like to be part of the future of Pride in London please register your interest or share this opportunity with your network.

The Role  

Pride's audience is (unsurprisingly) diverse. From parade applicants to journalists and queer performers, many different types of people use our digital platforms. Frankly, we could do a better job of making sure our user journeys are optimised for them.

In the past we'd conduct annual research after each Parade, but our shift to support the community more year round means this is no longer enough. We're looking to establish a team who can help us understand how best to support the community using our digital platforms, and to get them involved in the design process itself.

User Research will be a new team at Pride which sits within Digital. We look after Pride's website, app and application processes, to make sure that anyone engaging with Pride online has a great experience.

Responsibilities

• Creating a user research strategy and roadmap for the Digital team
• Documenting user research techniques and mentoring your team on how and when to use them
• Building a diverse user panel who can be consulted regularly to test our ideas and concepts
• Validating ideas submitted by members of the public or internal stakeholders with the community
• Collaborating with the Analytics Lead and her team to provide recommendations for our roadmap based on your insights
• Collaborating with the Design team to conduct usability testing on their prototypes before they go into development

Who you are 

• You should work as a full time researcher in your 9-5, and ideally already have experience managing a team
• As a Lead your priority is to mentor and support your team, so you may not always be able to conduct research yourself and you should be OK with that
• You should be passionate and excited about the possibilities at Pride, and be able to keep your team motivated (which can be tough as volunteers during a pandemic)
• Being proactive in this role is key, and you should always be looking for ways to improve how we work as a Digital team
• Finally, we need someone who is confident in giving and receiving feedback in the team, as it's the only way we can really get better

 What you'll get out of it

• The opportunity to build a new team from scratch within an established Digital team
• The chance to try out new techniques and tools you might not be able to use in your day job
• The chance to influence the wider organisation strategy with insights that go beyond digital platforms
• Experience in building and mentoring a team of user research professionals
• The chance to collaborate with Analytics, Content, Design, Product, Project Management and Tech experts in the team
• A nice feeling, knowing you're using your skills to make a difference

Time commitment required

As a Lead we ask for a bit more time than other volunteers at around 6-8 hours per week. It's easiest to think of it as two evenings each week or a full day at the weekend dedicated to Pride. We do our best to work asynchronously so you can break work up throughout the week as you choose, but do need a meeting or two a week to solve problems or make decisions together.

What you’ll get joining Pride in London  

• A friendly and welcoming induction course and a variety of training that’s offered throughout the year 
• An opportunity to get new and relevant professional experience
• A chance to broaden your professional network
• Play an important part in delivering the Pride in London event 
• Social opportunities to meet the diverse and friendly bunch who volunteer for Pride in London