About the Design Research team
At Canva, our users are at the heart of everything we do. Our Design Research team plays a vital role in the vision and success of our company. One of the best things about Canva is how much everyone across the business cares about users and improving their experience - you’ll never have to sell anyone on the value of user research.
Our team conducts qualitative and quantitative research to inform design decisions, product strategies, and identify opportunities. We believe that research findings are most powerful when they’re out of reports, and actively being applied and used by product teams. Researchers partner with PMs, designers, engineers, and marketers to help them better understand Canva’s multi-faceted user base, solve complex challenges, and improve the product experience for millions of users worldwide.
Our research team is diverse, collaborative, and supportive. We each bring unique strengths and interests to the group and encourage each other to grow in our craft every day.
About the Supergroup
Content & Discovery is the driving force behind Canva's success, offering users access to an extensive content library and facilitating seamless discovery through search, recommendations, and AI-driven experiences.
About the Group
The Inspire Group is on a mission to inspire the world to create, so Canva can empower the world to design. This cross-functional Group is responsible for the core content and discovery experience across Canva’s global marketplace, connecting billions of users to a vast library of content, printable products and generative AI capabilities which enable them to refine and bring clarity to their creative ideas.
From their first awareness of Canva, to their first design and beyond, the Marketplace is critical to the success of our product. You’ll help to empower our billions of users to make their best designs ever—across print, education, social media, branding, websites, and so much more.
About the role
We are searching for an experienced Design Researcher to help us define the design direction and product strategy for our inspiration and creation experiences in Canva. Research projects you’ll oversee directly tie to Canva’s company-wide goals, so increasing user understanding and identifying key product opportunities is of critical importance.
Your sphere of ownership includes:
- Assessing the template and content needs of Canva’s diverse userbase. This includes individuals, businesses and Enterprises, and teachers and students around the world, using Canva in different languages and devices.
- Understanding how these diverse users move from idea through to finished design, with particular focus on the inspiration and getting started steps.
- Understanding how our current features and workflows are performing – including new AI features like Magic Design – and how they can be improved
- Exploring topics around creative confidence and design proficiency. How can Canva help users grow their design skills (explicitly and implicitly?
- This includes studying their brand setup & marketing campaign requirements.
- Generating insights that empower users to bring their brand to life.
…plus more!
What you’ll do
- Lead high-priority research projects for the Inspire Group including assessing the template and content needs of our diverse, global userbase
- Apply a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze user and product data and distill this into written and visual reports.
- Build relationships and closely collaborate with your project stakeholders, and across the Supergroup
- Participate and contribute to our UX Research sub-specialty: own or contribute to special projects, provide feedback to fellow researchers, share your ideas for how we can improve
- Provide consultative guidance to PMs and Designers conducting their own research, within the Design Experience Supergroup (e.g. office hours)
- Be a champion for our users, and product experience: share your insights publicly across the company and inspire change that needs to be made to improve the Canva user experience.
- Be a role model for the quality of research work we strive for at Canva
Experience you will have:
- The ideal candidate is a qualitative researcher with experience leading research studies: planning, recruiting, executing, analyzing, and activating. We expect to hear examples of how your research influenced product and design team decision-making.
- You have a solid understanding of primary research methodologies such as interviews, diary studies, participatory design, ethnography, surveys, usability testing, and know when these are best used. Additionally, you combine these with data sources like product data, experiments, support tickets to understand user needs holistically.
- Pragmatism. You can creatively flex research plans depending on team needs, understanding and clearly communicating trade-offs.
- You thrive in a fast-paced work environment that requires strong problem-solving skills and autonomy.
- You have experience closely collaborating with product teams (PM, Design, Engineering, Marketing, and more). You enjoy collaborating with stakeholders throughout projects, and consider bringing them along the journey to be an essential part of the process.
- You have experience mentoring and helping designers and PMs become better researchers. For example, providing feedback on research plans, interview technique, or final reports.
- Strong communication and facilitation skills. Whether it’s during a workshop, presentation, or even a Slack message - you have an innate ability to rally a team together and inspire change.
Nice to have, but not a requirement:
- Experience conducting research for B2B and B2C software products
- Experience conducting research with a global userbase
- Experience conducting rapid research
- A degree in Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction, Social Science or a related field