As a Senior User Experience Designer you have a passionate interest and exceptional capabilities in the envisioning, discovery, design and development of engaging user experiences. You thrive in a work environment that requires excellent problem solving skills and directional autonomy, coupled with exceptional team collaboration, facilitation, and communication skills. You individually focus on applying both creative and analytical approaches to any UX challenge, leveraging both your team's input and most importantly that of the user. You must be comfortable working in a fast-paced and innovative development environment embedded in a development team. An extensive understanding of contemporary user-centered design patterns and methodologies is a must.

Key Job Responsibilities / Results

Mentoring & Advocacy: Serves as unofficial coach and mentor to User Experience Designers and other members of the UX team while advocating for consistent and effective UX.

• Gives critical feedback on designs of team members and offers advice on best practices of user experience design
• Looks for opportunities to level up individual designers and the entire team
• Drives implementation of consistent user experience design on product teams

User Discovery: Understands and empathizes with user needs and underlying requirements, drawing constraints to be designed for.

• Collaborates with the team to identify, define, and drive a product vision
• Responsible for investigating known and discovering unknown UX user challenges

• Engages with users, subject-matter experts, and stakeholders to gather actionable feedback and reveal underlying problems.
• Works closely with product managers, other UX designers, visual designers, developers, copywriters, and user researchers to fully understand and resolve issues, concerns, and problems that result in delivering high quality product experiences
• Creates/employs user personas and utilizes those personas and behavior modeling to produce viable design ideas
• Understands the implications of work being done for addressing the needs and concerns of the larger customer base of Workiva and evolving business markets

Solution Design: Rapidly designs, iterates, and validates user experience solutions to meet user needs and constraints.

• Responsible for designing for both known and unknown UX solutions
• Understands ecosystem patterns, but knows when to replicate or innovate
• Designs at the ecosystem level seeing their product as one of a whole
• Collaborates with team members and stakeholders to explore new approaches that will provide optimal solutions
• Facilitates discussions to ideas from the abstract concept to an actionable design.
• Designs solutions that can be leveraged in products that meet a broad range of customer needs and requirements
• Demonstrates ideas to stakeholders through the use of tools such as concept models, sketches, wireframes and prototypes

Build, Measure, Learn: Creates prototypes to determine the success of a solution; while continuing to iterate and improve the solution after launch.

• Identifies and articulates what a success for the solution will look like
• Collaborates with the PM and research to create metrics to measure such
• Engages with users to determine value of design solution
• Deciphers feedback for rapid data-informed iteration of the solution
• Works with development team to deliver the resulting solution meeting user needs
• Tracks, follows-up and iterates on the delivered solution on a timely basis.

Competencies

Leadership Competencies

• Leadership: Engages, leads, and develops people toward the mission, vision, and values of the company
• Business Acumen: Demonstrates knowledge of the organization and its structure, technologies, culture, and systems

Values-based Competencies

• Organizational Commitment: Demonstrates commitment to the job, colleagues, Workiva and its mission by acting in ways that further the accomplishment of its goals
• Customer Focus: Values the importance of delivering high quality, exceptional and innovative service to internal and external customers; understands the needs of the customer
• Action Driven: Takes initiative in recognizing opportunities and takes appropriate action to capitalize on them
• Teamwork: Collaborates and cooperates with colleagues to promote effective peer and work relationships

Core Competencies

• Communication: Effectively shares and receives information through active listening and using clear oral, written and interpersonal communication skills
• Job Mastery & Continuous Learning: Takes responsibility for one's continuous learning by identifying and applying new skills as needed to perform successfully on the job
• Interpersonal: Establishes working relationships of trust and respect with customers and colleagues to build strong connections, cooperation and collaboration
• Critical Thinking: Demonstrates reasoning and judgment when evaluating situations and solving problems

Skills

• Ability to craft a user experience vision and communicate it to peers and stakeholders
• Excellent conceptualization and visual communication skills
• Ability to prototype what is designed in the right fidelity
• Can clearly articulate and defend design decisions
• Ability to think on feet and persuade others
• Excellent attention to detail
• Ability to accept feedback and incorporate that feedback into design solutions
• Strong critical feedback skills that help level up peer design work
• Collaborative approach that brings good resolution to tough design questions
• Excellent analytic skills
• Ability to quickly understand and empathize with users
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Experience

• Six to ten plus years of experience in user experience design, interaction design or related field in a software development environment
• Demonstrated strong proficiency in user experience design to include lean user experience design, discovering innovative solutions, rapid prototyping and leadership
• Previous experience in web development, graphic design or software engineering
• Portfolio demonstrating strong design aptitude is highly recommended

Education

• B.A./B.S. in design, software engineering, psychology or equivalent experience
• Master's degree in human-computer interaction, interaction design, user experience design or similar degree preferred

Working Conditions & Physical Requirements

• Depending on assigned work location, walking outdoors between company campus facilities in a variety of weather conditions may be necessary to perform responsibilities of this position
• Less than 10% travel to meet with customers or key stakeholders