About the Lead Interaction Designer (UX Lead)
Are you interested in being at the center of a team that leads the development of exciting new web metasearch user experiences and products? Are you excited about new technologies and new approaches to interfaces? Do you like to observe culture and wonder what makes users behave they way they do? Are you intrigued about the next search technology emerging in the marketplace? You’ll also need an instinctive sense about what constitutes a good user experience.
We sure hope so because there’s much work to be done. There are big projects in the works for 2008. This position reports to the Director, User Experience.
Essential Duties & Responsibilities
• Maximize the impact of user-centered design to translate business and functional requirements into user flows, interaction models, wireframes & page layouts that clearly and elegantly communicate great user experiences.
• Develop, evaluate, iterate and implement high quality detailed user experience specifications, including wireframes, final spec documentation and all that happens in between. You’ll also ensure that products are deployed according to these specifications.
• Define the user models and user interfaces for new and existing metasearch products.
• Ensure that user experiences meet both the strategic goals of the product teams and the goals and needs of users interacting with the product.
• Help guide market research, including unmet needs analysis, competitive usability analysis, and focus group and usability testing.
• Influence the research teams to produce actionable outputs to influence product designs.
• Posses a thorough understanding of the full lifecycle of a strong user experience process.
• Present user experience interface concepts and design approaches clearly and convincingly to multidisciplinary teams.
• Work with the creative, web development and engineering teams to meet requirements for projects.
• Act as a resource for implementation troubleshooting with development.
• Be the user advocate in brainstorming, team interactions, brown bags and product reviews.
Required Skills, Education & Experience
• 7+ years interactive agency, in-house, or combined experience in solving complex user problems with intelligent experience design.
• Domain Expertise in many of the following: Information architecture, interaction design, primary consumer research, strategic planning, web analytics, search engine optimization, online editorial.
• Excellent knowledge of interaction design fundamentals and best practices
• A career history & portfolio of successful consumer focused projects, especially in search & media.
• Senior experience with all aspects of user interface design, research feedback (collection and reporting), and the full process required to create outstanding user interface experiences.
• Excellent written, oral and diagrammatic communication skills.
• Experience with task analysis and modeling, usability methods and testing.
• An online portfolio of live sites or work samples is required.
• Bachelor’s Degree or higher in Human Computer Interaction, Design or a related field.
Desired Skills
• Advanced degree in a related field: HCI, Information Systems, MBA, Journalism, etc.
• Proficiency with design and prototyping tools such as PhotoShop, Illustrator, Flash, InDesign, Visio.
• Knowledge of capabilities and limitations of Web technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, Flash, and CSS
• Experience with Agile Development/Scrum processes is great to have.
• Skilled at iterative, rapid prototyping of design concepts
• Experience building and developing personas.
• Understanding of and experience in the web 2.0 space is highly preferred.
• Experience leading consumer research activities Some of the following acronyms and terms should mean something to you
• UCD, UX, IA, ASIS, B&A, UXMatters, UER, IxDA, UPA, Adaptive Path, SEO
About InfoSpace
InfoSpace, Inc. uses its unique metasearch technology to power a portfolio of branded websites such as Dogpile, WebCrawler, MetaCrawler, and WebFetch.com and provide private-label search services. Our edge is two-fold: proprietary metasearch technology and our relationships with leading search engines. Our metasearch-driven searches cover more of the Internet because they combine the most relevant returns from multiple search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and Windows Live Search. InfoSpace metasearch helps advertisers achieve a much higher match rate than any other search engine, and sites hosting metasearch receive a higher pay-per-click rate, which is a key selling point when InfoSpace engages with potential private-label search customers.
also, always interested in starting conversations with skilled freelancers that can help out on a project basis.