Senior Product Designer

We are hiring a senior-level designer to work on our product team. This designer will create new features for our web and mobile applications and help create a design system in collaboration with our design director and other product peeps.

Experience

The great philosopher Indiana Jones once said “It’s not the years honey, it’s the mileage.” That’s how we feel about experience. (minus the machismo)

Ideal candidates will have worked on consumer-facing applications serving thousands of users, and for long enough to have encountered meaningful successes and failures. Whether that’s happened over 12 years or 12 months, it’s the mileage that matters.

At Zaarly, the designer’s role is to show what we intend to make and to work closely with one or two developers to see that vision through to production. Ideal candidates will need little acclimatization to this environment.

Our designers also facilitate their team’s conversation about a project around user needs, business goals, and technical possibilities. Candidates should have experience balancing, prioritizing, and incorporating feedback from multiple sources into their work.

Read more about how we work in our Employee Handbook.

Required Expertise

TL;DR We’re looking for an expert visual UI + UX designer. Candidate’s varying strengths in interaction design, copywriting, experimentation, and user research will also be weighed. This job requires working knowledge of HTML/CSS/Sass and basic comfort with Git.

Visual Design

Able to create production-ready visual design from scratch.
Able to articulate reasons for design decisions.
Can work effectively across web, mobile (with an understanding of basic platform conventions), and basic print.
Has created or contributed to a style guide for a complex website.
Bonus: Has contributed color palettes, iconography, and/or typography to a design system.

UI Design

Can identify the need for new or innovative elements and can design and style them effectively.
Knows how to wield a grid.
Experience working with (and working around) UI libraries like bootstrap, bourbon, Jquery UI, etc.
Bonus: Has contributed UI components and/or patterns to a design system.

UX Design

Able to envision and illustrate complex user flows at a system or ecosystem level.
Understanding of basic psychological principles that impact a user’s experience with our products.
Ability to effectively prioritize an MVP based on the user’s needs, technical constraints, and business goals.

Required Competency

Interaction Design

Able to create mockups and prototypes at a fidelity appropriate for team communication.
Able to use established patterns to produce innovative solutions for web, mobile web, and native apps.
Knows when to create something new vs. use a pattern.
Experience creating simple animations.
Can work effectively at an application level.
Bonus: Ability to work across complex domains (e.g. with home assistants like Alexa, Google Home, Siri, or TV apps, smart watches, etc.).
Bonus: Ability to work at a system/ecosystem level (e.g. creating integrated/consistent interactions at a brand-level or across a suite of applications)

Qualitative Research

Able to lead interviews with users.
Able to draft an effective interview guide

Experiment Design

Able to design an effective lean experiment based on experience.
Able to define appropriate metrics to test and communicate informed suggestions based on the results.

Copywriting

Can write effective interaction copy (captions, CTAs, notifications, errors, menus, tooltips, etc.)
Can write compelling informational copy (headlines, subheads, product on-boarding, product-generated emails, etc.)

Tools/Technical

Must know Sketch.
Has excellent judgement on choice of tool/method for the task at hand.
Willing and able to learn new tools.
Bonus: Familiar with Abstract or other design versioning systems.
Bonus: Able to introduce new tools to improve our design process.

Required Adequacy

Project Management

Able to break a single complex project into phases and/or iterations.
Proactively communicates project updates to stakeholders.
Conversant regarding technical and/or business issues

Front-End Development

Able to make direct edits to HTML/CSS/Sass.
Demonstrates basic comfort with git.
Stays on top of new developments in UI development.
Bonus: Able to write JS and/or work with jQuery (though not necessarily at a production level).