UX Designer

General expectations:

• Be trusted to make good decisions.  
• Recognize when to ask for further guidance and support.  
• Contribute to the development of design concepts.  
• Interpret evidence-based research and incorporate this into your work.  

Carry out a wide variety of research, design, and prototyping tasks, including:

• Understand product goals and user needs.   
• Conduct concept and usability testing and gather feedback.   
• Create personas based on user research and collected data.   
• Define an interaction model and evaluate its success.   
• Develop wireframes and prototypes around customer needs.   
• Prepare and present rough drafts to internal teams and key stakeholders.   
• Identify and troubleshoot usability issues.   
• Create mockups and prototypes.   
• Share progress and interact with team using a version control system.  

Also, as a member of the project team you will:

• Collaborate in an agile environment with multi-disciplinary teams including strategy, research, content, visual, and development.  
• Facilitate ideation through sketching and collaborative activities, such as design sprints and other participatory design activities.   
• Create storyboards and step-by-step flows of varying resolution to communicate a person’s experience through a system.  
• Conduct evaluative user research (for example, user testing of prototypes or existing products, heuristic analyses, and interviews).   
• Work integrally with developers to shepherd designs through the development process.  
• Promote the importance of human-centered design practice throughout the organization and with Bixal’s clients.  
• Implement, maintain, and expand upon project plans with emphasis on high degree of quality in conjunction product managers and development managers.  
• Mentor and develop team members in alignment with Bixal’s brand and overall direction.  
• Keep abreast of industry trends and tools and communicate findings out to the team and Bixal.  
• Help build a culture of continuous improvement across all levels of design — strategic, structural, and surface — where designers (including yourself) feel challenged with meaningful work and see a clear path for growth. 

Qualifications:

• Minimum 3 years of experience in UX, product design, or commensurate work experience.  
• Bachelor’s degree.  
• Must have a portfolio of experience that demonstrates previous work.  
• Must be able to obtain Public Trust clearance.  
• Agile mindset. You have experience of working in agile, including an awareness of agile tools and how to use them. You can advise colleagues on how and why agile methods are used and be able to provide a clear, open and transparent framework in which teams can deliver. You can adapt and reflect and be resilient. You have the ability to see outside of the process. 
• Communication. You can listen to the needs of technical and business stakeholders, and interpret them in a way that is clear for both audiences. You know how to manage stakeholder expectations. You can be flexible and you are capable of proactive and reactive communication. You know how to facilitate difficult discussions within the team or with diverse senior stakeholders. 
• Team collaboration. You know how to work collaboratively within a group, actively networking with others and varying feedback for the appropriate time to ensure the discussion sticks. You can use your initiative to identify problems or issues in the team dynamic and rectify them. You can pull out issues through agile health-checks with the team to provoke the right responses. 
• Evidence- and context-based design. You can absorb large amounts of conflicting information and use it to produce simple designs. 
• Working within constraints. You can identify constraints and can communicate about these and work within them. You know how to challenge the validity of constraints. You can ensure standards are being met. 
• Leadership and guidance. You contribute to best-practice guidelines. You understand the sustainability and consequences of your decisions and can make decisions characterized by managed levels of risk and complexity. You can resolve technical disputes between wider peers and indirect stakeholders, taking into account all views and opinions. 
• Prototyping. You approach prototyping as a team activity, actively soliciting prototypes and testing with others. You can establish design patterns and iterate them. You can use a variety of methods of prototyping and choose the most appropriate ones. 
• Strategic thinking. You can work within a strategic context and communicate how activities meet strategic goals. You can contribute to the development of strategy and policies. 
• Human-centered. You know how to collaborate with user researchers and can represent users internally. You understand the difference between user needs and the desires of the user. You can champion user research to focus on all users. You can prioritize and define approaches to understand the user story, guiding others in doing so. You can offer recommendations on the best tools and methods to be used. 
• Inclusive design mindset. You know how to regularly apply the practices of accessible and inclusive design to your work throughout the whole process. You can work with team members and specialists to ensure the work is adhering to inclusive principles while balancing the design intent and achieving a high-quality experience.  

Nice to Haves:

• Experience working with U.S. government agencies.  
• Experience with Drupal-based projects.  
• Experience with prototyping-in-code.