Lead UX Designer

Description

Who we are

Idea Couture at Cognizant Digital Experience is a carefully assembled network of studios of human-centered design practitioners from a wide range of educational backgrounds, international settings, and professional experiences that help organizations navigate and innovate in complex and uncertain environments to connect people with extraordinary experiences.

We're a strategic innovation and experience design firm. That means we're all about bringing new things-products, brands, solutions, services, technologies, strategies, structures, systems, and organizations-into the world. By combining insights with inspiration, process with collaboration, and empathy with economics, we help our Fortune 500 clients innovate more deliberately and effectively. We operate where design meets business, insight meets foresight, and empathy meets economics.

We love big ideas and even bigger ambitions. We stand out because we put human experiences at the core.Using design thinking methodologies, we solve problems and identify business opportunities-generating new growth, meaningful differentiation, and economic value, while improving everyday lives. The transformative solutions we provide our clients are born of transdisciplinary thinking, balanced research, and inventive methods, based in business rationale and good design.

Among us you'll meet anthropologists, sociologists, futurists, strategists, designers, technologists, engineers, and other super smartpeople-andeveryone collaborates. We foster an environment where people are encouraged to explore beyond the walls of their job descriptions.

If you're thoughtful, ambitious, and intellectually curious, we'd loveto hear from you.

Who you are

As a Lead Interaction Designer, you bridge the customer experience to the business.You build useful products that improve people's lives and create the interactions between humans and digital experiences.For you the user always comes first.Through research,co-creative design workshops,and testing,you identifypainpoints,unmet needs, and areas of opportunity thatlead to concepts and solutionsarticulatedbysitemaps,userjourneys, wireframes and clickable prototypes.You've been called aninformationarchitect and designer,but you're also ananthropologistand psychologist.Youobserve userbehavior,listen to whatusers'say,empathize withtheir joy and painthat youtranslate intorelevant,interactiveexperiences tailored to the context.

You manage UXD activities from interaction design workshops, to prototype development. That voice in the room is your voice, leading the UX conversation with clients - guiding their decisions while securing approvals. You're a teacher and foster professional growth within the ranks. You lead a small band of talented UX folks that bring experiences to life. And when you're not making clients deliriously happy, you might also find yourself architecting concepts to help land the next big deal.

What we share

• A knack for looking at familiar problems through a unique lens
• Desire to change minds, hearts, and behaviors with new experiences
• Passion for driving market growth through innovation, technology, and design,
• A belief that understanding people can better guide business priorities and strategies

What your day-to-day will look like:

• Know the business objectives, requirements, and project goals

• Demonstrate to internal and external clients an understanding of their products and marketing challenges, and are responsive to the strategic and creative needs of the brand
• Design and conduct ethnographic research and user testing
• Translate and synthesize research findings and discovery data (workshops, lab studies, field visits, ethnography, stakeholder interviews) into distinct user needs that inspire you and your teams' technically feasible concepts and feature solutions
• Drive the prioritization of concepts, features, and requirements for new products and experiences
• Weigh in on and help steer what defines experiences to ensure user needs are considered

• Provide ideas and feedback to fuel collaborations with UX/UI designers and technical teams in an agile design and development process
• Collaborate effectively across disciplines, product lines and roles
• Develop, lead, and inspire UX team members, each responsible for defining and delivering end-to-end user experience design
• Foster career growth and skill excellence for junior level interaction design team members
• Choose what interactions work best within a given context

• Organize large data sets and varied content types into logical hierarchies and patterns that are intuitive and easy for users to understand
• Produce sitemaps, wireframes, user journeys, and interaction flows
• Establish and document rules and principles around interactive behavior, usability patterns, and accessibility for design systems
• Join in the creation of journey maps and persona archetypes that represent differing mental models
• Present UX deliverables to internal teams and client stakeholders

• Contribute to business development efforts including concepts, project approaches, and estimations
• Work effectively in a fast-paced environment juggling multiple meetings, ubiquitous projectasks, and the unexpected

What you'll need

• 7+years of Interaction design experience or related designdiscipline
• 2+ years managing team members
• A college degree in UX Design, or related field of study
• Strong client leadership and facilitation skills with the ability to command and guide a room
• Proven ability to critique, analyze, and elevate strategies and ideas

• Expert understanding of cross-functional resources and building effective teams
• Strong user testing and researchexperience,capable of designing and running research and synthesizing insights into actionable outcomes
• Strong information architecture experience
• Experience working with large teams on long-term projects within an agile workflow.
• Current with UX design patterns, trends, and best practices

• Well-versed in web accessibility guidelines and compliance
• Proficiency with modern prototyping and collaboration tools such as Adobe XD, Figma, Miro, Mural (or equivalent)
• Note: Currently travel is not a requirement; would expect up to 25% as business requirements change

What's in it for you?

• Multidisciplinary learning across backgrounds, approaches, methods, and industry expertise
• Be a part of and play a critical role in shaping a niche and nimble culture that is characterized by collaboration and camaraderie within a global firm
• Access to global scale, from the types of projects you work on to resources you collaborate with and lean on
• Experience with a broad range of challenges in experience design, from whitespace opportunity definition to downstream realization

• A competitive salary and benefits package
• A workplace that prioritizes wellness and working flexibly to ensure you get the balance you need to meet the demands of your personal and professional life

Application Requirements

• A stellar portfolio that demonstrates your mastery of interaction design. Samples should include well-written descriptions of your journey from problem solving to solution