Senior Games User Researcher

As a Senior User Researcher on the R&D Central User Research Team, you’ll report to the Head of Central User Research. You'll be part of the R&D Strategic Research team, partnering with leaders on games in the early stages of development within the R&D Office. You'll conduct studies and analyses to inform the direction, experience, systems, and features of Riot's new games. You will also contribute to the vision for how playtesting will be used and performed for new games. Your scientific skill-set coupled with your audience insight will ensure that we have a deep understanding of Chinese players; how best to understand them leveraging user research, and ultimately make games in a player focused way. 

As a member of R&D Office, you’ll partner with many teams within R&D to execute playtests and audience research across many products, with a focus on early stage games. You’ll use your research background, understanding of the market, audience, and familiarity with game development to contribute to the success of our teams. You are a master at building research activities and will support from initial game direction all the way through post-implementation evaluation.

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.
• Be an advocate for our players and provide strategic guidance about their wants, needs, and behaviors
• Contribute at the R&D Office level on strategy and operations as part of the R&D Strategic Research team
• Help to drive operational best practices and craft standards for how we use user research in R&D Office, with a specific focus on how best to conduct research in China
• Construct and perform labs, studies, and surveys - sometimes with novel or complex methodologies - designed to answer business, design, development, and usability questions
• Share your results with game and R&D Office leadership in clear, illustrative presentations that drive meaningful change
• Mentor other researchers, helping them learn from your experiences

Required Qualifications:

• Education background in ONE of the following categories:
• Advanced degree in Psychology, Anthropology, Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Science, Human Factors or a related discipline plus 2 years of relevant research experience in game development
• Bachelors degree in Psychology, Anthropology, Human-Computer Interaction, or a related discipline plus 4 years of relevant research experience in game development
• Experience running playtests and usability tests 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
• Fluent in Chinese and English, and can promote collaboration across different languages and cultures

Desired Qualifications:

• 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
• 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