Join Lloyds Banking Group as a Design Researcher (12-Month FTC)
JOB TITLE: Design Researcher (12-Month FTC)
LOCATION: Bristol or Manchester
SALARY: £59,850 - £66,500
HOURS: Full Time
DURATION: 12-Month Fixed-Term Contract
WORKING PATTERN: Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week, or 40% of our time in the office.
NOTE: Occasional travel to other group locations (e.g. Leeds, London, and Edinburgh), may be required.
About this opportunity
Group Technology & Innovation (GTI) is Lloyds Banking Group's strategic innovation engine. GTI is made up of multiple venture teams working with a startup mindset to tackle complex problems and explore new growth opportunities. We focus on identifying emerging technologies and disruptive trends, rapidly experimenting to validate bold ideas, and shaping solutions that help Lloyds stay ahead of the curve and build the bank for the future.
Our teams operate like lean start-ups within the Group, bringing together design, research, engineering, and business expertise to turn early-stage opportunities into tangible outcomes at pace. We thrive in ambiguity, move fast, and work collaboratively to transform bold ideas into scalable solutions that deliver real impact for customers and the business.
As a Researcher, you'll play a pivotal role in shaping the direction of our ventures. You'll work across the entire innovation journey right from framing problems and uncovering deep customer insights, to validating solutions and informing strategic decisions. You'll collaborate closely with peer designers, technologists, and business leads to reduce uncertainty, bring clarity to complex challenges, and ensure that everything we build is grounded in real user needs and evidence.
What we are looking for:
Core Skills
1. Full-funnel Research Strategy and Planning: Designs research programmes tailored to each phase of the innovation funnel - from open-ended discovery in Ideation and Problem Fit, through solution validation and MVP testing, to optimisation at Scale. Aligns methods to learning goals and risk assumptions at each phase.
2. Research Operations and Customer Panel Management: Establishes and manages reusable, segmented customer panels to support agile, ongoing research. Handles end-to-end operations including recruitment pipelines, consent and ethics, documentation, tooling (e.g. Maze, Dovetail, Gorilla), and governance. Enables self-service research when needed and ensures consistency in participant engagement.
3. Generative Research and Problem Framing: Conducts in-depth qualitative research - including interviews, ethnography, diary studies, and contextual inquiry - to uncover latent user needs, behaviours, and pain points. Synthesises insight into actionable opportunity areas that shape the team's understanding of the problem space.
4. Evaluative Research and Solution Testing: Designs structured testing of product or service concepts to assess usability, desirability, clarity, and value. Uses tools like Gorilla, UsabilityHub, or Maze to run rapid remote tests and A/B comparisons. Collaborates closely with UX/UI Designers and Product Owners to ensure insight feeds directly into decisions.
5. Quantitative Research and Validation Techniques: Uses robust methods like surveys, conjoint analysis, card sorting, and benchmarking studies to understand user preferences, prioritise features, or estimate demand. Triangulates qualitative insight with behavioural data for more confident decisions.
6. Insight Synthesis and Storytelling: Makes sense of complex data, surfacing clear behavioural patterns and opportunity areas. Translates research into narratives, personas, and user needs that the team can easily work with. Communicates findings visually and verbally to inspire, align, and influence decision-makers.
Desirable Skills
1. Mixed-method and Triangulated Studies: Combines qualitative depth with quantitative scale. Designs research to answer "what," "why," and "how" questions in tandem - using behavioural analytics, usability data, survey insights, and interviews to validate decisions from multiple angles.
2. Inclusive and Ethical Research Practice: Designs studies that consider diverse abilities, perspectives, and contexts. Handles consent, privacy, and participant wellbeing with care - embedding ethical standards into recruitment, moderation, and data handling processes.
3. Collaborative Research and Influence: Works closely with designers, product managers, service teams, and analysts to ensure insights are well-integrated into decision-making. Facilitates sense-making sessions and participatory synthesis to help others own and act on insight.
4. Tooling and Documentation Mastery: Skilled in using and managing research tools such as Dovetail, Gorilla, Optimal Workshop, Lookback, or Maze. Documents findings in accessible, searchable formats and contributes to a growing knowledge base over time.
About working for us
We're disability confident. So if you'd like reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes, just let us know.
We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:
* A generous pension contribution of up to 15%
* An annual performance-related bonus
* Share schemes including free shares
* Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping
* 30 days' holiday, with bank holidays on top
* A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies
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