Human Factors Researcher

Location: Reading, United Kingdom

In fast changing markets, customers worldwide rely on Thales. Thales is a business where brilliant people from all over the world come together to share ideas and inspire each other. In aerospace, transportation, defence, security and space, our architects design innovative solutions that make our tomorrow's possible.

Together we offer fantastic opportunities for committed employees to learn and develop their career with us. At Thales UK, we research, develop, and supply technology and services that impact the lives of millions of people each day to make life better, and keep us safer. We innovate across five major industries; Aerospace, Defence, Ground Transportation, Security and Space. Your health and well-being matters to us and that’s why we offer you the flexibility to do what’s important to you; whether that’s part time hours, job sharing, home working, or the ability to flex your start and finish times. Where possible, we support a working pattern that suits your lifestyle and helps you reach your ambitions.

Human Factors Researcher

Reading

In fast changing markets, customers worldwide rely on Thales. Thales is a business where brilliant people from all over the world come together to share ideas and inspire each other. In aerospace, transportation, defence, security and space, our architects design innovative solutions that make our tomorrow's possible. Together we offer fantastic opportunities for committed employees to learn and develop their career with us.

The RTI (Research, Technology and Innovation) function is at the centre of Thales UK supporting growth in all of the key market areas, and spearheading activity into future markets identified as growth opportunities.

Creating an environment where staff find working with RTI an enjoyable, empowering and creative experience. As a key capability in RTI, the Human Factors Team are responsible for shaping the future user experience of Thales technology
- as a Human Factors Researcher you will be leading our efforts to integrate new technology with users in a range of complex environments, including the challenge of AI integration into systems, novel user interfaces and technology using ‘human-machine teaming’ concepts. The goal is to create technology and a user experience that drives forward Thales as a business and develops technical capability across Thales’ existing and future market segments.

Key responsibilities:

- Represent Thales as a Human Factors & User Centred Design Champion, both within Thales and externally with existing and future customers.
- Implement experiments - these are likely to be fast-paced and agile research activities, rather than long-term experiments
- Lead internal and external “guerrilla usability” evaluations of equipment, software tools and processes.
- Co-lead design sessions, workshops and contribute to prototype design. Design, conduct, and analyse experiments with end users of our systems.
- Collaborate engineering team members as they conduct design-based research and rapidly iterate prototypes.
- Sensitively interact, in-person and online, with Thales team members, and external contacts, customer or users
- Plan, write, and deliver research outputs at a level suitable for publication
- Assist Thales Design Centre London team in setting technical strategy and provide innovation services on projects in close collaboration with business units. Liaise with external technology developers and experts to understand market and technology developments in user centred design, User Experience or human factors, pan domain.
- Begin to develop your own external contacts within Human Factors and R&D, focusing on user interface design and human factors, attending
- Provide thought leadership in new and active technology and business areas to meet the needs of Thales UK.

**Skills**:

- Experience in a technical role - having specialised in one or more of the following areas:

- Human Factors
- User Experience
- Applied Psychology
- User centred design
- System Engineering
- Prior experience of defence projects and working on Human Factors Integration (HFI) activities - knowledge and experience of JSP 912, DefStan 00-251 and relevant ISO standards
- Excellent communication skills - being able to communicate complex concepts clearly, interactively, and persuasively to a range of different audiences.
- Ability or willingness to learn how use rapid prototyping tools, such as Balsamiq, Adobe XD and other audio/visual tools to communicate concepts
- Ability to demonstrate leadership of a project, including management of that project [administrative and financial] - if you have no experience in this area, Thales will develop you in this area.
- Ability to demonstrate a track-record of independent work with supervision/support from a senior Human Factors specialist
- Able to demonstrate an aptitude for designing user interfaces or systems that can solved real world problems