Research Lead

Research Lead at Barclays UK

The purpose of this Research Lead role is to create user-centred and visually appealing designs for digital banking products. This is achieved through conducting user research, designing user interfaces and experiences, collaborating with various stakeholders, and continuous improvement.

Key Accountabilities

• Execution of user research and usability tests to understand customer needs, pain points, and to integrate feedback and preferences into banking products and services, in collaboration with product managers and developers.
• Creation of intuitive and user-friendly interfaces for digital banking platforms and applications to ensure a seamless and engaging user experience.
• Design and maintenance of visually appealing and consistent user interfaces that align with the bank's brand identity and design guidelines across digital products.
• Creation of wireframes and interactive prototypes for visualisation and testing of product concepts and features before development.
• Ensuring accessibility considerations are met, to provide an inclusive experience for all users by complying with accessibility standards and guidelines.
• Monitoring industry trends, design best practices, and emerging technologies to continuously improve the design quality and innovation of banking products.

Vice President Expectations

As a Vice President, you will contribute to or set strategy, drive requirements, and make recommendations for change. This includes planning resources, budgets, and policies; managing and maintaining policies/processes; delivering continuous improvements and escalating breaches. If leading a team, you will define jobs, responsibilities, plan future needs, counsel employees, and contribute to pay decisions. As an individual contributor, you will act as a subject matter expert, guide technical direction, lead collaborative multi-year assignments, and coach less experienced specialists, influencing long-term profits and strategic decisions.

• Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross functional areas of impact and alignment.
• Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda.
• Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.
• Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business.
• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.
• Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives, requiring in-depth analysis and interpretative thinking.
• Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes.
• Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

All colleagues are expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass. They will also demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.

Join Our Team

Join us as a Research Lead, sitting within the DCOE and focusing on Project Prism – an initiative to redesign tools for Bankers into a single platform. This role involves covering work across Prism (50%) and across tribes (50%), offering a mixture of leadership and hands-on work. You will initially work across the BX team and then pick up handover, collaborating with 4 VP tribe leads, a Service Design Lead, and Engineering Leads for Tribe. This position aims to grow out Barclays UK's research capability.

Required Skills & Experience

• Experience with quantitative and qualitative research methods.
• Proven ability to lead research within a program of work or as a dedicated function.
• Experience working effectively with cross-functional teams, including engineering, design, and product.

Highly Valued Skills

• Demonstrated leadership, managing, and mentoring capabilities.
• Experience with vendor management and research operations.
• Ability to align and work effectively with Customer Experience (CX) and across various business units.

You may be assessed on key critical skills such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen, strategic thinking, and digital and technology, in addition to job-specific technical skills.

Key skills/competency

• User Research
• Usability Testing
• UX Design
• UI Design
• Wireframing
• Prototyping
• Accessibility Standards
• Stakeholder Collaboration
• Quantitative Research
• Qualitative Research
• Digital Banking