Lead UX Designer

The Role:

As a Lead User Experience Designer at Verbal+Visual, your responsibility is to bring industry best practices alongside innovative and fresh thinking to drive conversion and average time on site. You effectively bridge business strategy, needs, and objectives with the target users' goals, desires, and preferences.

You have the ability to thrive with limited oversight and bring an articulate point of view to collaborative conversations with Strategy, Visual Design, and Development. Your track record demonstrates your ability to research, strategize, design, prototype, test and present your design solutions. You welcome feedback and anticipate adapting your design based on insights gleaned from user research, client notes, and cross-departmental input. You think about the big picture and love defining user needs and architecture as much as layouts and interactions.

You will:

• Support and report directly to our Associate Creative Director and the Creative Director. 
• Work directly with our Product team to ideate on potential solutions and gather insights to connect strategic goals and expectations to creative work.
• Work directly with our Visual Design team, delivering them wireframes, product specs, and assets when necessary.
• Organize and perform design reviews with Associate UX designers to ensure that best practices and standards of quality are met prior to sharing with the client for feedback.
• Be an excellent communicator when presenting work (internally or client-facing), or handing off work, demonstrating the ability to articulate your design intent and decisions made to ensure a successful outcome. 
• Assist Sales, Product, and Production departments by providing clear estimates to inform SOWs, project Roadmaps, monthly retainers, change requests, etc. 
• Oversee usability testing to validate design solutions or validate assumptions and hypotheses.
• Be accountable to lead, review and provide oversight of deliverables such as sitemaps, user-flows, persona development, customer journey mapping, and presenting key findings and recommended solutions generated by Associate UX Designers
• Demonstrate the ability to utilize agency-preferred design software to execute projects on budget, on time, and to specifications.
• Design and lead the design of wireframes and prototypes.
• Communicate clearly with design Directors through expected channels.

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience in UX design and interactive work for mobile and web. 
• 3+ years of experience launching websites, software, apps, and e-commerce projects. 
• From discovery, user research and site architecture, concepting to wireframing, user testing, prototyping, and handing off to developers, you enjoy every phase of the digital design process.
• An understanding of the principles of responsive design for the web and the impact this has when generating digital solutions. Takes a mobile-first approach.
• Experience and familiarity with design tools such as Sketch app (preferred), Figma, and Adobe XD. 
• Prior knowledge of prototyping tools such as Principle (preferred), Invision, Marvel and/or POP.
• Familiarity with accessibility principles and standards, interpreting analytic data, and designs with an ability to anticipate motion and interaction.
• Above all else -- an excellent attitude, a desire to work collaboratively giving/receiving feedback, and a passion for empathetic design! We are looking for someone with a level-head who is comfortable taking direction while remaining intellectually curious and always asking, why? 
• E-commerce design experience and an online portfolio is highly desired (Shopify Plus experience preferred).