Senior UX Researcher / Service Designer

Overview

DecisionPoint seeks a Senior UX Researcher / Service Designer to lead user experience research, service design, journey mapping, and human-centered analysis for a large federal and DoD-aligned mission environment. This role conducts deep qualitative and quantitative UX research, identifies user needs and pain points, develops personas, maps end-to-end journeys, and designs holistic service experiences across digital and non-digital touchpoints.

The Senior UX Researcher / Service Designer partners with PMO leadership, application teams, content strategists, product owners, and behavioral scientists to deliver human-centered insights that drive improved usability, accessibility, adoption, and mission outcomes.

This position is fully remote.
Duties & Responsibilities

The Senior UX Researcher / Service Designer will:
- Lead end-to-end UX research efforts including interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing, and ethnographic studies.

- Develop user personas, archetypes, and segmentation models based on behavioral insights and research findings.

- Map current and future-state user journeys, service blueprints, workflows, and ecosystem diagrams.

- Identify pain points, friction areas, user needs, motivations, and information gaps across user journeys.

- Facilitate co-design sessions, workshops, and ideation activities with stakeholders and mission users.

- Synthesize research insights into actionable design recommendations, stories, and evidence-based experience strategies.

- Support UX requirements gathering and collaborate with product, design, and development teams.

- Ensure solutions adhere to Section 508 and accessibility best practices.

- Deliver high-quality research reports, insights decks, wireframes, and service design artifacts.

- Benchmark user experience trends, design standards, and federal digital service best practices.

- Provide subject matter expertise in human-centered design, service design methodology, and UX research operations.

Qualifications
Clearance Requirement

Candidate must possess a Tier 2 Moderate Risk Public Trust (from any federal agency) or an active Secret clearance or higher .
Education (Required)

Bachelor’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Human Factors, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, UX Design, or a related field.
Experience (Required)
- Minimum 10 years of experience conducting UX research, service design, usability testing, or human-centered design.

- Experience delivering personas, journey maps, service blueprints, and UX research deliverables for federal or enterprise programs.

- Demonstrated ability to synthesize user research into actionable, strategic recommendations.

- Experience collaborating with multidisciplinary teams including product, development, content, and PMO leadership.

Technical Knowledge (Required)
- Proficiency with UX research tools such as Optimal Workshop, UserTesting, Dovetail, or similar.

- Familiarity with design tools such as Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, or Miro.

- Strong understanding of service design frameworks, journey mapping, and experience modeling.

- Knowledge of accessibility principles and Section 508 requirements.

Technical Knowledge (Preferred)
- Experience with human-centered design within federal digital service environments.

- Familiarity with Agile, DevSecOps, or design operations.

Certifications

Preferred:
- Human-centered design certifications

- UX research or UX strategy certifications

- Service design accreditation

Skills
- Exceptional qualitative research and synthesis skills.

- Strong facilitation abilities for workshops and co-design sessions.

- Ability to translate complex findings into compelling visual artifacts and narratives.

- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

- Strong empathy, curiosity, and attention to detail.

- Ability to drive human-centered decision-making across diver