UX Researcher/Designer

UX Researcher

Grant Thornton is a major Audit, Tax, and Advisory Services company offering a broad range of services in strategy and consulting, operations, technology and more across various industries.

In the U.S., Grant Thornton delivers professional services through two specialized entities: Grant Thornton LLP, a licensed, certified public accounting (CPA) firm that provides audit and assurance services ? and Grant Thornton Advisors LLC (not a licensed CPA firm), which exclusively provides non-attest offerings, including tax and advisory services.

With $2.7 billion in revenues and more than 50 offices spanning the U.S., Ireland and other territories, the platform delivers a singular client experience that includes enhanced solutions and capabilities, backed by powerful technologies and a roster of 12,000 quality-driven professionals.

Grant Thornton is hiring a contract UX Researcher to assist with the Discovery phase for our internal web apps. Their job: figure out what users need and turn that into clear direction for product, design, and engineering.

They’ll work under a Lead US Designer and with Product Managers, Engineers and Business Stakeholders on this initiative.

Responsibilities:

• Lead discovery: Plan and run user research to understand jobs, pain points, and workflows.
• Facilitate sessions: Run interviews, workshops, and stakeholder discussions—ask the “obvious” questions that surface assumptions.
• Summarize what they learn: Turn notes into clear findings, “what this means,” and recommend next steps.
• Map the experience - Create:
• Role snapshots (personas): brief summaries of user types and needs.
• Step-by-step journeys: how users currently work, where it breaks, and the better future state.
• Simple screen sketches (wireframes) & flow diagrams: quick visuals that show how a task should work.
• Keep everyone aligned: Present short, clear readouts; document decisions; maintain a simple research archive.

What You Will Deliver:

• Tools you know: Figma, Mural, Office
• A practical UX plan and interview results.
• A short deck communicating findings → what it means → recommended actions.
• Lean personas for key roles.
• Current-state and future-state journeys with pain points and simple success measures.
• Task/flow diagrams and low-fi wireframes for critical paths.
• A prioritized UX backlog.
• Mockups as neccesary.

What We Need From Every Candidate:

• Resume with hourly rate, location, time-zone overlap.
• 2–3 samples (journey map, personas, insights readout, low-fi wires). Redactions OK.
• Best discovery project (goal, what you did, outcome).
• Examples from enterprise or B2B applications
• Start date and weekly capacity

Must Haves:

• 4–7+ years doing user research on product teams (enterprise or B2B preferred).
• Tools you know: Figma, Mural, Office
• Comfortable planning and running interviews, observing real work, testing early ideas, and doing quick usability checks.
• Strong at turning raw notes into clear insights and prioritized recommendations.
• Can independently produce personas, journeys, task flows, and low-fidelity wireframes in Figma, Mural, or similar.
• Confident facilitator; good at guiding groups, handling pushback, and driving to clarity.
• Excellent written and verbal communication—exec-friendly and concise.

Nice to Haves:

• Design experience and portfolio of enterprise-related work, or similar.
• Experience in complex or regulated spaces (tax, audit, finance, healthcare, public sector).
• Basic survey skills to complement interviews.
• Service design exposure (e.g., mapping processes).
• Light Research Ops (consent, recruiting, templates).
• User testing and feedback gathering
• Design experience with high-fidelity mockup and/or clickable prototypes.