UX Designer-Shopping & Buying Experience

Volkswagen Group of America (VWGoA) is the parent company of Audi, Volkswagen, Lamborghini, Bentley, Bugatti, Ducati, and VW Credit, Inc. (VCI) in the US. As the financial arm of Audi, Volkswagen and Ducati, VCI focuses on providing financing, insurance and ancillary products for customers who lease or finance cars, and we are working towards creating great experiences throughout their shopping, buying and post-purchase experiences.

As part of the Global Volkswagen Group’s “Route 2025” strategy, large investments are being made globally toward becoming the industry leader across multiple areas including Digital products and experiences. Here in the US, VCI is redefining and building its digital experiences, products, and features as part of this overall growth strategy. 

 The Shopping & Buyer UX Design Specialist, along with the Product Manager, will own all customer research, prototyping, IA mapping, low and high fidelity UX design, and product branding for the Shopping and Buying Experience team at VCI (this is a new role on a new team). We have the opportunity to reinvent the car buying experience, and we are looking for passionate, empathetic, compelling user interaction designer and researcher with significant experience building consumer facing digital experiences to help uncover new ideas and bring them into production quality reality. To fit in, you have to be jazzed about delivering amazingly simple experiences for complex, distributed processes and help us rethink how customers shop for and buy their cars. You have to true everything back to the customer, ensuring you’re both solving a need for them and delighting them with every interaction. You’ll be expected to utilize your full range of product design, interaction design, and visual design skills!

This role will have visibility to the management teams of VCI, Audi, Volkswagen, and Ducati so it will be critical for this design lead to have exceptional communication skills.

Responsibilities will include:

• Designing experiential research
• Moderating empathy research sessions
• Designing flows and experiences that are incredibly simple, elegant and integrated into our customer’s digital and physical experiences (e.g. dealers) for every product and feature we conceptualize, research, and launch
• Contributing to high-level strategic decisions with the rest of the product team
• Partnering with product managers and engineers to oversee the user experience of a product from conception until launch (and then some)

 Experience:

• 5-7 years of experience with digital product design (service and interaction)
• 2-4 years of in-person empathy based customer research
• Omnichannel design experience, including mobile design or mobile development experience

 Education:

General Skills:

• Passion for identifying and solving real consumer and business problems
• Entrepreneurial ability to identify and prioritize opportunities in highly ambiguous contexts
• Product thinking and vision
• Flexible in design approach, working across the spectrum of low (drawings, wireframes) and high (production ready design) fidelity
• Experience building and shipping applications or software
• A fantastic storyteller who is at ease presenting to, and can influence, senior executives

Required Specialized Skills:

• Expertise in customer research techniques and in-person moderation
• Proficient using tools like Sketch, Illustrator, Fireworks, Photoshop and Invision
• Can efficiently use skills to develop integrated, multichannel interaction flows and needed new designs within existing and new visual systems and design languages
• Understanding of service and interaction design, physical and digital experiences, and eCommerce.
• Experience with front-end programming (html and css) with the ability to work closely with engineers to implement designs

Desired Specialized Skills

• Define interaction models, user task flows, and UI specifications. Communicate scenarios, end-to-end experiences, interaction models, and screen designs to stakeholders. Work with our creative director and visual designers to incorporate the visual identity of Twitter into features. Develop and maintain design wireframes, mockups, and specifications as needed.

Work Flexibility:

• Travel 20% of the time

We are proud to be an EEO employer M/F/D/V. We maintain a drug-free workplace and perform pre-employment substance abuse testing.