Design and Research Director

This position is incentive eligible.

This is OUR story... and YOUR next chapter

At HCA Healthcare, our Digital Transformation and Innovation (DT&I) team is redefining what’s possible inpatient care. By leveraging the power of artificial intelligence, automation, and digital technologies, DT&I is helping drive meaningful improvements in clinical outcomes, reduce manual workload, and expand the reach of our care teams. If you're passionate about using technology to improve human life, this is where your work truly matters

The Director of Design Research reports directly to the VP of Design and leads a human-centered discovery practice within DT&I, focused on understanding real workflows, user behavior, operational friction, and opportunities for measurable improvement.

This role brings together the strengths of user research, ethnography, workflow understanding, and process excellence to support a modern discovery model grounded in real-world observation, product strategy, and experience measurement.

Working in close partnership with designers, this leader guides discovery across product and operational initiatives, collaborating with Product, Operations, Value Tracking, Change Management, Innovation Hub, and business partners. The Director helps teams move from assumptions to evidence by observing how people actually work, identifying where friction occurs, and translating human interactions, behaviors, and pain points into clear design opportunities, better workflows, stronger adoption, and meaningful operational impact.

• Lead DT&I’s design research practice with a strong focus on ethnography, real-world observation, and human-centered discovery.

• Plan, conduct, and guide ethnographic research to understand how users actually work in their real environments, including workflows, behaviors, workarounds, pain points, motivations, and moments of friction.

• Partner hand in hand with designers to translate ethnographic findings into journey maps, workflow insights, design opportunities, product concepts, and measurable experience improvements.

• Lead discovery efforts across priority product and operational initiatives, ensuring teams deeply understand the user, workflow, and context before defining solutions.

• Conduct contextual inquiry, field observation, shadowing, interviews, usability testing, diary studies, surveys, journey mapping, service blueprinting, and workflow analysis.

• Identify the gap between documented processes and real-world behavior, highlighting where operational friction, cognitive burden, duplicated work, or missed value occurs.

• Synthesize complex field observations into clear insights, personas, user journeys, opportunity areas, design principles, workflow recommendations, and executive-ready narratives.

• Collaborate with Product, Operations, Value Tracking, Change Management, Innovation Hub, Engineering, Education, and business partners to connect research findings to roadmap priorities, adoption strategy, measurable outcomes, and operational impact.

• Establish repeatable ethnographic research standards, templates, interview guides, observation frameworks, synthesis methods, and insight repositories that scale across DT&I.

• Coach researchers and cross-functional partners on ethnographic methods, field observation, research synthesis, facilitation, and storytelling.

• Facilitate research readouts, synthesis workshops, journey mapping sessions, and cross-functional alignment discussions.

• Measure the experience before and after product changes using qualitative feedback, usability metrics, adoption data, satisfaction measures, and operational indicators.

• Champion a culture where teams move from assumptions to evidence, from static process maps to real workflows, and from discovery activity to measurable product and experience impact.

• Bachelor’s degree in Design Research, Human-Computer Interaction, Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, Cognitive Science, Human Factors, Service Design, Industrial Design, or a related field required.

• Master’s degree or PhD preferred.

• 10+ years of experience in design research, UX research,…