Contract User Experience Researcher Jobs in Michigan

Role Summary: About the UX Team

Come and join the Tax UX Research Team as we work to transform Thomson Reuters into a truly Digital company. We are not just changing the way customers engage with us - we are transforming and re-imagining our business by focusing on the individual user. We are looking for curious, smart, self-driven UX professionals who love the challenge of turning complex problems and constraints into elegant solutions that meet our users' needs.

Our team promotes an agile, collaborative, supportive environment where diverse thinking, innovative design, and experimentation is welcomed and encouraged. Our work focuses on a large portfolio of transformational efforts as we work together to deliver on the promise of making it easy to do business with Thomson Reuters.

About the Role:

In this Lead position, you will drive the end-to-end UX research practice for a complex, high-impact product portfolio. This portfolio currently includes agentic-focused CoCounsel migration, Guided Assurance redesign, Confirmation NextGen, and GoFileRoom modernization efforts. You will be expected to lead both strategic generative research and evaluative studies, shaping how the team uncovers and acts on deep user insights.

As a Lead, you will go beyond execution - you will form key partnerships with product, engineering, and design to surface deeply impactful research opportunities, advocate for user-centered decisions in product roadmaps, and provide strategic and thought leadership on UX research practices and methods. You will support less experienced researchers on the team through coaching, peer review, and by continuously raising the bar for research quality and influence. This is an individual contributor role and does not include formal people-management responsibilities.

About You:

You are enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the end-to-end product development process, with a special emphasis on demonstrating the business impact of UX research and insights. You think beyond the click and ask: Why would anyone want to push this button in the first place? You are an experienced leader with experience working side by side with Product, Design, and Engineering leaders to solve the right problems at scale.

You can write about research findings in a way that does not require voice-over - clear, compelling, and self-contained.

You bring deep knowledge and experience with a wide variety of research methods, both qualitative and quantitative, including:

• Qualitative analysis and reporting; interviewing and group facilitation techniques

• Contextual Inquiries, Remote Usability Testing, Parallel Prototyping, Persona Development

• Un-moderated feedback tools (e.g., UserZoom)

• Ability to triangulate data from many sources

• Quantitative methods, specifically: statistical analysis, experimental/A-B test design, and survey methodology

• Other User-Centered Design (UCD) methods to develop user insights

You have deep knowledge and practical experience structuring user needs through fundamental UX frameworks such as Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) and Customer Experience Outcomes (CXOs). You use these frameworks not just to describe user behavior, but to connect research insights directly to business and product decisions.

Experience researching with regulated or compliance-driven professional users (e.g., tax, audit, financial) strongly preferred.

You can keep pace with agile testing while maintaining the strategic perspective needed to give design teams long-term goals for hitting user objectives. You influence decisions and next steps with product and design partners, are comfortable navigating trade-offs, and advocate for user-centered outcomes in roadmap prioritization.

AI & Research Acceleration

• Experience evaluating AI-powered or agentic product experiences with real users and production data - assessing trust, transparency, error recovery, and non-deterministic output quality. This is distinct from using AI tools to speed up your own research process, and is a priority for this role.

• Experience building, using, or experimenting with AI tools (e.g., Claude and other AI platforms)

• Practical experience applying AI to accelerate research workflows, synthesis, and insight generation

• Experience building prototypes with AI tools that pull directly from a body of insights to illustrate recommendations.

• A mindset focused on responsible, thoughtful adoption of AI to raise the efficiency and impact of UX research

Lead Expectations in an Embedded Model

• Proactive and self-directed - identifies opportunities and acts without waiting for direction

• Provides strategic and thought leadership on UX research practices, methods, and the team's overall research approach

• Partner with other customer insight functions, including Product Marketing and Customer Experience teams to create a more holistic research roadmap and triangulate data

• Takes initiative to shape research strategy, not just execute studies

• Forms key partnerships with product, engineering, and design to unearth deeply impactful research opportunities

• Advocates for user-centered decisions in roadmaps and influences next steps with product and design partners

• Navigates trade-offs thoughtfully and helps teams make informed, user-grounded decisions under constraints

• Supports less experienced UX researchers through coaching, peer review, and mentorship (coaching and peer review - not formal people management)

• Continuously raises the bar for what "Lead level" research looks like in quality, influence, and outcomes

• A strong team player who collaborates naturally while operating autonomously and owning results end to end

Responsibilities

In this role, you will own the full research lifecycle - from intake and scoping through execution to demonstrating measurable business impact:

• Quickly synthesize business objectives and customer needs to define the right research scope

• Develop a UX research approach, schedule, and detailed test plan

• Plan, partner with Research Ops on developing strategies on how best to recruit our target audience, script, facilitate, collect, analyze, and document data

• Lead strategic generative research to identify unmet user needs and long-horizon product opportunities

• Identify and articulate user needs first, and then potential usability issues, both verbally and through documentation

• Transform data into prioritized, actionable recommendations within a short turnaround time

• Influence product and design decisions - not just report findings, but drive next steps

• Clearly communicate qualitative analysis, recommendations, and potential design solutions

• Create persuasive presentations for product owners, developers, visual designers, other UX team members, and C-level executives

• Facilitate internal meetings to triage and manage research findings

• Demonstrate the business impact of research through clear before/after framing, behavioral outcomes, or measurable product changes

• Previous experience with leading research projects involving complex workflows, visualization of large datasets, operating system-level tools, and both web and software environments is a plus

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a Social Science, or Master's degree in Social Sciences, Interaction Design, Human Factors, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, or a related field

• Located within commuting distance of Office Location, or willing to relocate at your own expense, to meet the hybrid (2-3 days/week onsite) schedule for this role

• 8+ years of experience applying research to high-volume, interactive B2B and B2C applications, rich web-based applications, or websites

• Demonstrated experience with quantitative research methods (e.g., statistical analysis, experimental design, survey methodology) in addition to qualitative expertise

• Strong analytical problem solving, decision-making, and leadership skills

• In-depth understanding of user-centered design principles and tools

• Familiarity with SharePoint and project management tools such as ADO, Linear

• Familiarity performing studies in a virtual lab environment

• Familiarity with data-logging tools and systems such as Tableau, Qualtrics, Pendo, V0, or other BI analytic programs

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