About the position
The Insights discipline helps empower Rioters' decision-making to be more data-informed. We're an interdisciplinary group of scientists, consultants, and strategists from all sorts of backgrounds who join together to represent and advocate for gamers around the world. We believe that illuminating the globally diverse experiences, behaviors, and needs of gamers is critical to Riot living up to our player-focused mission. We're a group united by our love of games, science, and helping others succeed. As a Researcher III for Riot Discovery Studios (RDS) on the Central User Research Team you'll be part of the larger RDS Central Insights group, partnering with leaders on early and late discovery game projects in RDS (i.e. prototyping and pre-production phases). You'll conduct studies and analyses to inform the direction, experience, systems, and features of Riot's new games. You will also conduct robust audience research to deepen the understanding of these game's potential players. Your scientific skill-set coupled with your audience insight will ensure that we are continuously building confidence that teams are making a game that will be truly awesome for players.
Responsibilities
- Drive user research efforts on game teams in partnership with production & design leadership on high complexity, ambiguous problem spaces to help direct the experience of our new games, systems, and features.
- Construct and perform labs, studies, and surveys - sometimes with novel or complex methodologies - designed to answer business, design, development, and usability questions.
- Be an advocate for our players and provide strategic guidance about their wants, needs, and behaviors.
- Meaningfully contribute to discussions on the best way to conduct and improve testing and audience research work for games in development.
- Help to drive operational best practices and craft standards for how we use user research in RDS Office.
- Share your results with game and RDS leadership in clear, illustrative presentations that drive meaningful change.
- Mentor other researchers, helping them learn from your experiences.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Psychology, Anthropology, Human-Computer Interaction, or a related discipline plus 4 years of relevant research experience in game development.
- Experience in user research, especially in testing methods that yield useful qualitative sentiment (i.e. discussions, IDI), quantified sentiment (i.e. surveys), and direct observation of behaviors (i.e. think aloud).
- Experience running playtests in a variety of paradigms potentially including moderated testing, unmoderated testing, focused feature-specific testing, holistic and longitudinal testing, and more complex or constrained testing paradigms.
- Trusted to operate independently regardless of structure, owns larger problems/projects/workstreams.
- Ability to work collaboratively with others.
- Experience synthesizing and presenting data for maximum impact and understanding.
- Experience designing and performing basic survey research.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience conducting games user research during the early stages of the development life cycle particularly incubation, prototype, and pre-production.
- Familiarity with audience research including methods for identification and definition (larger scope qual, larger scale/scope quant, MROC, segmentation, persona development).
- Familiarity with basic statistical methods for data analysis (regressions, correlations, factor analyses).
- Familiarity with qualitative methods and analysis.
- Experience leading complex projects with multiple collaborators and work streams.
- Experience managing vendors.
- Experience working with leadership at the 'team of teams' level on strategic and operational problems.
Benefits
- Open paid time off policy.
- Flexible work schedules.
- Medical, dental, and life insurance.
- Parental leave for you, your spouse/domestic partner and children.
- 401k with company match.
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