Design and UX Senior Manager

Stride, Inc. is a company focused on improving educational experiences through user-centered design. They are seeking a Senior Manager of UX Design to lead a team in creating user-friendly applications that align with business goals, while conducting user research and collaborating with cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities:

• Understands and articulates the product vision, problem definition, and opportunity
• Plans and conducts user interviews and data collection, and synthesizes findings to ground design decisions in evidence
• Develops process maps, user and data flows, and use cases to frame problems and make complex systems legible before solutioning
• Employs user-centered methodology to design functionality that accommodates user needs and meets the standards of navigation, layout, and labeling
• Collaborates with multidisciplinary teams in prioritizing functional requirements and developing design solution approach
• Communicates solution approach through development of mock-ups, user and data flows, use cases, wireframes and interactive prototypes, and specifications
• Identifies and develops new patterns as needed
• Provides light front-end development support and collaborates closely with developers to ensure designs are feasibly and faithfully built (familiarity with HTML/CSS and component-based UI)
• Communicates with colleagues and management to ensure product remains true to stated goals of functional design throughout development of product
• Initiates and incorporates feedback from usability testing of designs
• Understands and incorporates design principles and accessibility and mobile-friendly/responsive guidelines into product designs
• Contributes to continuous improvement of the scrum team, agile processes, and the User Experience community at K12 and proactively supports knowledge-sharing within and outside the UX team
• Leads team of UX Designers and occasional flex contributors; Provides guidance on design craft, research practice, and quality standards; sets goals, conducts performance reviews, and supports career development
• Works closely with Product, Engineering, IT Managers, and senior executives to align UX initiatives with organizational objectives. Ensures that design solutions adhere to governance and compliance requirements, including student data privacy
• Acts as the Lead UX Designer on a Scrum team. This involves:
• Partnering with product owners to understand the vision and business value for the feature or project; participating in planning sessions to develop and maintain the feature or product roadmap
• Understanding the product backlog and user story prioritization in order to conduct and incorporate user research and deliver designs before implementation
• Collaborating with cross-functional teams comprised of product management, UX Designers, Visual Designers, Developers, Testers, and other subject matter experts to understand information needs and functionality requirements, dependencies and impacts, and facilitate user story development and design
• Ensuring delivery of artifacts as agreed to by the team including flow diagrams, conceptual designs, wireframes, interactive prototypes, visual designs, and specifications that adhere to accessibility and mobile-ready guidelines
• Reviewing implementation for adherence to designs and style guide/
• Participating in daily standups and taking the initiative to prepare for and organize other necessary meetings such as design reviews

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in user experience design, human-computer interaction, product design, or related field AND
• Five (5) years of experience in planning and executing successful web applications OR
• Equivalent combination of education and experience
• Solid understanding of user-centered design principles
• Experience solving complex design problems for Web interactions or software solutions
• Solid understanding of innovative graphical user interface design, information design, and interactive design
• Ability to craft visual representations of large systems, complex relationships, data and task flows
• Experience with Agile/Scrum and responsive design or mobile applications
• Excellent written, oral and diagrammatic communication skills
• Adept with relevant design and information flow software, such as Sketch or Axure
• Ability to clear required background check
• Experience designing for accessibility (WCAG 2.0)
• HTML and CSS coding experience
• Experience working with geographically-dispersed teams