Hardware UX/UI Designer

Hardware UX/UI Designer

Based: High Wycombe / Hybrid
Term: Permanent, Full time
Salary: Dependant on experience + excellent benefits

The Role:

Focusrite seeks an exceptional Hardware Product UX & UI Designer to join a growing product design team.  

As a Designer at Focusrite & Novation, you will work with cross-functional teams to help conceptualise and deliver outstanding products, services, and experiences.  

Our team focuses on the customer's needs and has a shared passion for understanding and solving the problems they face. We collaborate with our Product Management, Engineering, and Marketing teams to craft beautiful, effortlessly intuitive and engaging solutions.  

If you want to join a passionate and creative team in an exciting company that is committed to growing and evolving, we would love to hear from you.  

Please note that whilst this role will collaborate closely with Industrial Designers, the focus of this role is on product features, interactions, and interfaces.   

Who you are:

• You care about why people make and record the content they do, whether it's a podcast, full bands, or entirely in-the-box music. You understand that all people are at a different point in their journey. You are passionate about music and audio and have a good understanding of production and music creation workflows. 
• You are empathetic and customer focused. You seek to learn from our customers through research and testing, and you have them at the forefront of your mind for each decision you make.  
• You are curious about why products, services, and objects have been designed the way they are. You seek to understand the designer's intent and how well the solutions meet the customer's needs.  
• You think differently and practice both divergent and convergent thinking at the appropriate points in the design process.  
• You enjoy collaborating with multi-disciplined teams and can clearly communicate your ideas through sketches, wireframes, and interactive prototypes to ensure that stakeholders at all levels understand the design approach.  
• You enjoy getting hands-on with making and testing prototypes. You are resourceful and able to think outside the box on ways to prototype an idea effectively.  
• You can objectively assess your own designs and appreciate the importance of different perspectives and group critique. You're able to facilitate and resolve differing perspectives on design decisions.  
• You are always looking to improve your skills and working practice to help drive the capabilities of the Product Design Team.  

What you’ll do:

• Work with the Product Design, Product Management, Engineering & Marketing teams to help conceptualise and deliver to market, outstanding and award-winning hardware products and services  
• Create and execute User Research strategies (both primary and secondary) that yield critical insight and help shape project direction. 
• Be an advocate for the end-user, ensuring a deep understanding of users' goals, needs, pain points, behaviours and contexts influences your team’s work. 
• Develop User Stories and Use Cases, taking user needs and converting them to product requirements and documentation.
• Design/Ideate both collaboratively and individually. You'll lead team design activities. 
• Develop sketches, wireframes & interactive hardware prototypes.  
• Regularly perform User Experience testing to refine the design. 
• Work with Tech Programme leads to ensure your designs meet cost & feasibility goals
• Present your work to your team and project stakeholders.  
• Work with the team to measure the impact of designs on customers and business goals.

Skills and experience required:

• Must be passionate about great design & user experiences.  
• 3+ years' experience within Hardware Product/Interaction Design, with a portfolio that clearly demonstrates your skills and process.  
• Able to consider and design for complex user needs and interactions between hardware and software.  
• A degree or relevant qualification in Product Design, User Experience, User Research, Human-Computer Interaction, Visual Design, or a related field  
• Strong technical knowledge of music-making tools, products, and processes such as DAWs, DSP & MIDI.
• Ability to lead a multi-disciplined team through a design process and deliver successful outcomes.  
• Have a growth mindset.   
• Self-motivated, adventurous, driven, and ambitious  

I don’t have all the experience you’ve asked for, should I still apply?   

Our priority is to find the right fit for the team, and for Focusrite/Novation, and we’ll always do what we can to support individual development.  In other words, if you don’t quite have all the experience listed above, we’d still be interested in hearing from you.  Let us know what you’d bring to the role, and why you’d be a great fit for the team. 

About Us

Focusrite plc is a global music and audio group that develops and markets music technology products. Used by audio professionals and amateur musicians alike, our solutions facilitate the high-quality production of recorded and live sound. Our audio technology brands stand together, seeking to enrich lives through music by removing barriers to creativity – ‘we make music easy to make’.

Benefits include flexible/hybrid working, company pension, life insurance, private healthcare, Health Cash Plan, enhanced Maternity and Paternity pay, employee purchase scheme, group bonus scheme, company music events, offsite company parties and free lunch in the canteen. We arrange company training sessions and encourage personal development.