What are the responsibilities and job description for the User Experience and Performance Summer Intern position at The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Inc?
Overview
Draper is an independent, nonprofit research and development company headquartered in Cambridge, MA. The 2,000 employees of Draper tackle important national challenges with a promise of delivering successful and usable solutions. From military defense and space exploration to biomedical engineering, lives often depend on the solutions we provide. Our multidisciplinary teams of engineers and scientists work in a collaborative environment that inspires the cross-fertilization of ideas necessary for true innovation. For more information about Draper, visit www.draper.com.
Our work is very important to us, but so is our life outside of work. Draper supports many programs to improve work-life balance including workplace flexibility, employee clubs ranging from photography to yoga, health and finance workshops, off site social events and discounts to local museums and cultural activities. If this specific job opportunity and the chance to work at a nationally renowned R&D innovation company appeals to you, apply now www.draper.com/careers.
Equal Employment Opportunity
Draper is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an affirmative action and equal opportunity employer. We understand the value of diversity and its impact on a high-performance culture. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, or genetic information.
Draper is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment, its services, programs, and activities. To request reasonable accommodation, please contact hr@draper.com.
Responsibilities
We work on exciting projects to solve hard problems at the intersection of engineering, design, and high-stakes scenarios such as: big data analytics, decision support tools, team collaboration systems, human-robot interaction, augmented reality, and contextual situation awareness tools in both the commercial and national security arenas. You will apply user-centered research, interaction, and visual design principles to create usable, engaging, modern, and intuitive interfaces for cutting-edge systems sponsored by the US Government, commercial customers, and internal R&D projects. Our users experience difficult challenges such as: high cognitive workload situations, high stakes tactical scenarios, complex data problems (including data visualization and overcoming cognitive bias), safety critical operations, and collaboration across distributed teams. The ideal candidate is an assertive self-starter, that can bring user-centered approaches to an engineering environment and engaging colleagues and building ideas in a team-centered environment.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
- B.S., Masters, or formal training in Human-Computer Interaction, Human Factors, Design, Computer Science, Product Management, Data Visualization, or similar field
- Top-notch user research skills: contextual inquiry, knowledge elicitation, any other creative methods for gathering high-quality data from remote or infrequent user interaction
- Demonstrated capability and attention to detail in UX, IX, UI, or Data Visualization design in documents, reports, mockups, screen designs, and research artifacts
- Good written, visual, and spoken communication skills
- Familiarity with Agile development and Atlassian’s agile suite in particular
Preferred Qualifications:
- A portfolio or case study of work showcasing UX, IX, UI, or Data Visualization design and concept validation – please share a link to work samples in your application
- UX Research - Comfort and confidence leading user research sessions, coming prepared with a plan and being resilient to rapid scheduling / focus changes, delivering artifacts that support software development decisions
- IX Design – ability to apply their skillset to new subject matter areas and ability to incorporate new knowledge into documented best practices with the intention to improve future work and capture a knowledge base of relevant subject matter areas, building design artifacts as probes for user research questions
- UI Design - Creation of scalable Sketch libraries design toolkits for product lines
- Experience working closely and iteratively with engineering and development teams
