User Experience Researcher

Senior UX Researcher

Location: London

Working pattern: Hybrid – 3 days in the office / 2 days remote

Level: Senior Individual Contributor

The Opportunity

Trust in SODA is partnering with a well-known consumer health, fitness and wellness brand that is undergoing a major digital transformation.

The business has an established customer base and physical presence, but is investing significantly in the next generation of its digital experience – looking at how technology can create a much more personalised relationship with its customers.

This includes mobile and web experiences, booking and membership journeys, personalised health and wellness products, wearable integrations, customer data and emerging AI-powered experiences.

As part of this investment, the business is building out its Product and Design capability and is now looking for a Senior UX Researcher to help ensure customer insight sits at the heart of what gets built.

The Role

This is a hands-on Senior UX Research position with the opportunity to influence products from their earliest stages.

You'll work closely with Product Designers, Product Managers, Engineers, Data teams and senior stakeholders to understand customer behaviour, uncover unmet needs and help teams make better product decisions.

Crucially, this isn't simply about testing products once they've already been designed.

You'll be involved much earlier in the process – helping the business understand what it should build, why it should build it and what customers actually need.

You'll work across a broad range of digital challenges spanning health, fitness, wellbeing and personalised consumer experiences.

What You'll Be Doing

You'll lead research across key areas of the digital experience, from early discovery and proposition development through to usability testing and optimisation.

You'll be responsible for:

• Leading end-to-end UX research across multiple digital products and initiatives
• Planning and conducting qualitative and quantitative research
• Running customer interviews, usability testing, concept testing and discovery research
• Understanding customer behaviours, motivations, needs and pain points
• Identifying unmet customer needs and potential product opportunities
• Testing new propositions and concepts before significant investment is made
• Working closely with Product and Design to influence product strategy and roadmaps
• Helping teams define the right research questions and methodologies
• Synthesising complex research into clear, actionable insights
• Communicating findings to Product, Design, Engineering and senior leadership
• Combining research with behavioural and product data to build a deeper understanding of customers
• Helping establish research standards, processes and best practice as the Product and Design function grows

AI, Personalisation & Wellness

One of the most exciting areas of investment is exploring how AI and personalisation can improve people's health and wellbeing.

The business is exploring new digital experiences that could bring together fitness, recovery, health information, behavioural change and customer data to create more personalised guidance and recommendations.

Research will play a major role in shaping these products.

You'll explore questions around how people interact with AI-powered experiences, what creates trust, how comfortable customers are sharing health and fitness data, what information they genuinely find useful and how technology can encourage positive behavioural change.

You'll be researching these problems while the propositions are still being developed, giving you the opportunity to directly influence what ultimately gets built.

What We're Looking For

We're looking for an experienced UX Researcher who is comfortable operating with a high degree of autonomy.

You'll ideally bring:

• Strong UX Research experience within digital product environments
• Experience owning research projects from initial brief through to insight and recommendation
• Excellent qualitative research skills
• Customer interviews, usability testing, concept testing and moderated/unmoderated research experience
• An understanding of quantitative research methods
• Experience combining qualitative insight with behavioural or product data
• Strong discovery research experience
• The ability to identify unmet customer needs
• Strong synthesis and storytelling skills
• Experience translating research into actionable product recommendations
• Experience working closely with Product Managers and Product Designers
• Confidence presenting and influencing senior stakeholders
• The ability to challenge assumptions constructively using evidence
• Experience working within environments where not everything is already defined

Experience across consumer technology, health, fitness, wellness, AI, personalisation, subscription products, mobile applications or data-rich digital products would be particularly relevant.

Who Will Thrive Here?

You'll be naturally curious and genuinely interested in understanding why people behave the way they do.

You'll be equally comfortable conducting strategic discovery research and answering more immediate product questions, knowing when something requires deep investigation and when rapid research will provide enough evidence to move forward.

Most importantly, you won't see your role as simply producing research reports.

You'll want to work alongside Product and Design, challenge thinking, influence decisions and see your insights translated into real products and experiences.

You'll also have the opportunity to help shape how UX Research operates within the organisation, establishing better methodologies, processes and ways of working as the digital team continues to grow.

Why Join?

You'll be joining a recognised consumer organisation at a point where it's making a significant investment in digital products and customer experience.

There's an established customer base and the resources of a large organisation, combined with the opportunity to work on new products where many of the answers haven't yet been defined.

With major opportunities across AI, personalisation, health, fitness and behavioural change, you'll have the chance to influence not just how products are designed, but which problems the business chooses to solve in the first place.

I've also deliberately changed "members" to "customers", removed references to clubs, Virgin-specific benefits, Mansion House and the named AI Wellness Coach. Those are the sorts of details that would make it considerably easier for a candidate or another recruiter to reverse-engineer the client from the advert.