Jobs: E-Commerce UX Auditor (full-time remote position)

Are you good at analyzing UX on websites using heuristic? Do you like discussing the smallest of UX details?

We’re seeking a full-time UX Auditor for our auditing team.

Baymard Institute is an independent e-commerce UX research organization – beyond conducting our own large-scale research studies for Baymard Premium, we also conduct client-specific work in the form of ‘UX Audits’.

This is a remote full-time position that you can occupy from anywhere in the world (except Asia and the Pacific, due to time zone differences). Preferred working hours is “early” if you are on the US East Coast.

The Job

As a UX Auditor, you will be responsible for conducting client-specific UX audits, 80% of the job will be:

• Analyzing the UX of some of the world’s largest e-commerce sites – this is performed as an extremely detailed heuristic evaluation using a proprietary system and workflow, where Baymard’s research catalog of 700+ e-commerce UX parameters is used as the weighted heuristic (anchoring the audit in solid UX research).
• Identifying and prioritizing findings for the client site into a set of suggestions for improvement.
• Writing it all into a 50-150 page report and presenting it to the client in a 2-hour video conference call.

Around 20% of the time you will also be performing UX Benchmarking, an almost identical work process, only where the ‘client’ isn’t the website that’s being benchmarked, but rather our Baymard Premium customers.

Depending on your qualifications other roles will be possible over time.

Qualifications

We’re looking for the following qualifications for this role:

(7/7) Firm understanding of UX and user behavior – in this role you will not conduct usability testing yourself with end-users, but rather be performing heuristic evaluations – analyzing the UX of a website across Baymard’s 700+ parameters/heuristics. This will require a firm understanding of UX and user behavior. Having past experience with performing usability testing (remote or in-person testing) will however be a plus (but is not a strict requirement).

(6/7) Finding attention to detail exciting – in each audit we analyze the client site across 700 UX parameters, each of these 700 parameters then has 4-7 defined implementation nuances the audit must account for. This requires an extreme level of attention to detail and excitement for exploring the smallest of UI nuances of a site. Our best auditors know all 700 parameters, and most of the nuances within, by memory.

(4/7) Ability to communicate UX in writing – the primary deliverable for an auditor is the 50-150 page audit report. As the audit report relies on the foundation of Baymard’s vast catalog of UX research findings, but at the same time is a bespoke consulting project – you as an Auditor have to be good at accurately describing complex flows and user behaviors in writing. The audit reports are often read by a team with diverse backgrounds (managers, UXers, designers, and developers) – they all need to understand the described UX issue in just 4 paragraphs of text.

(5/7) Rigor over time – while the typical audit project lasts just around 2 weeks (and you’ll, therefore, work for a new and interesting e-commerce site roughly every 2nd week) – the auditing process itself and the underlying UX research dataset doesn’t change that much. So the UX Auditor role requires that you have a high degree of stability and will find it exciting to look for the same set of 700+ e-commerce UX nuances all year round (although obviously applying that dataset to a very broad variety of sites and clients, that change every 2nd week).

(4/7) Comfortable with client presentations – while audits are never presented in-person at the client offices (due to global clients, a remote team at Baymard, and somewhat short projects), the audit report deliverable is always followed up with a 2-hour conference call where you will be sharing your screen, walking the client through the audit report and key findings. Prior experience with client meetings and an ability to (correctly) answer general questions on anything related to e-commerce UX will be a plus, but is not a requirement.

(2/7)Good understanding of web-jargon – being able to describe the differences between ‘auto-complete’, ‘auto-fill’, and ‘auto-correct’ on the spot will be a necessity when presenting and discussing your findings with a diverse set of clients.

Each of the above qualifications is weighted, 7 is highest.

(Note that this is not a UX Designer or a UX Researcher job. At Baymard we don’t perform any kind of client design or client development work. The only client-specific work we perform is the highly detailed UX audit analysis in the auditor team – so if you are looking for a UX designer role or a role with very long and deep client relationships, this role as a UX Auditor is not for you. This is not a UX Researcher or UX Writer position either, so if you are looking for a job where you will be performing a lot of direct usability testing with end-users and want to write Baymard guidelines or article, this role as a UX Auditor is not for your either (instead sign up for our job alert as we do hire UX Researchers from time to time).

Other Job Specs

• Salary: in accordance with qualifications.
• Start date: as soon as possible, at the latest September 2020.
• Location: this is a remote full-time position. Baymard team and clients are 50/50 split between US east cost and Europe, so a 2 hours overlap per day is important (so preferred working hours is “early” if you are in the US).
• Language: we expect you to be fully proficient in written and spoken english.
• Travel: is limited, expect only 1-3 weeks of travel each year.

How to Apply

If you’re interested in this position please send the following documents:

1. A cover letter (as a 1-2 page PDF) – describing how you fit the role and qualifications.
2. A resume as (PDF file) – describing your background and past experience.
3. Any samples or other documents; for example heuristic evaluations you’ve performed, UX related articles you written, designs you’ve created etc.

Send the above to info+uxauditor2020@baymard.com

Deadline is August 2nd, 2020 – but apply as soon as possible as applicants will be processed as they are received. A paid hiring test will be performed for all selected candidates.

Tip, if you want to prepare the best possible consider:

• reading our audit sales page,
• watching this video explaining Baymard’s research and audit approach,
• familiarizing yourself with our UX Benchmark database,
• reading the “work values” section at the end of this page.

Sincerely,
Christian Vind & the audit team at Baymard Institute

Referral bonus

If this job isn’t you, but you know someone who’ll be the perfect fit, please send them the link to this page. If we end up hiring the person you referred, we’ll give you a 1 year access to a Baymard Premium ‘Medium’ plan (normally $1560/year).

Key Work Values at Baymard

The following work values are central to us at Baymard and hopefully gives you an idea of our culture and what working at Baymard is like:

• Flat organization – Baymard is a small organization of just ~15 people. This means zero management layers between you and the final decision. You’ll have direct access to and impact on decision making.
• Lots of responsibility – From day 1 (OK, maybe day 2), you will be working on final products or services. We believe the best way to learn is to work on actual products and challenges, supplemented with rich early feedback.
• Long-term focus – Decisions are always based on their long term impact. We’re not interested in hunting after the next “quick win” — we want to make a lasting impact on the e-commerce industry and usually adopt a 5-year perspective in our decisions and projects.
• Remote from the ground up – 90% of the team works remotely. We’ve deliberately designed the organization around remote work. That said, we do bring the entire team together for a week once a year somewhere interesting in the world.
• Team of ‘subject matter’ nerds – Everyone geeks out a bit on their work interests. We love that, and once a week someone from the team does a 20min presentation on their latest obsession — whether it’s quasi-quantum-worlds or the proper usage of hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes.
• Founders engaged in the product – We believe it is essential that those orchestrating the work of the organization are keenly in tune with all aspects of it. The two founders of Baymard have therefore performed every type of task in the organization themselves (from programming to UX testing), and continue to work directly on the product.