Senior Product Designer (contractor), Uruguay or Brazil

Overview

The Senior Product Designer (contractor) role at Very Good Ventures helps create smart and beautiful experiences that delight users and achieve client objectives. They execute and own design outputs, collaborate extensively with internal teams and external stakeholders, and help plan design activities on projects when needed. Wherever possible they establish design vision on a project, and drive design reviews accordingly. Their work ensures the experiences VGV delivers are the best that they can be.

ResponsibilitiesDiscovery

The Senior Product Designer (contractor) role helps drive the team’s understanding of users, experience opportunities, and client needs within a project. Expect to:

• Participate in / conduct stakeholder interviews 
• Audit existing experiences / designs
• Ingest existing UX documentation, supplementing where needed
• Participate in / conduct research with users to identify experience opportunities
• Conduct secondary research; analyze competitive or reference experiences
• Describe current and possible experiences using common UX artifacts: personas, journey maps, flow diagrams, site/application maps, etc.
• Help synthesize research findings into actionable insights
• Explore experience possibilities with moodboards, low-to-mid fidelity sketches, and simple design prototypes

Design

The Senior Product Designer (contractor) role’s core responsibilities are designing useful, usable, and desirable solutions for client challenges, and consistently delivering high-quality assets that support VGV projects. Expect to:

• Explore design concepts; develop beautiful, smart, executable, and extensible design ideas that achieve user and business goals.
• Communicate design intent to teams and clients.
• Help run internal and client-facing reviews; effectively manage feedback.
• Create core design assets, including: 
• Common UX diagrams (e.g., site/application maps)
• Low- to mid-fidelity visual representations of experiences (e.g., flow diagrams,  wireframes)
• High-fidelity visual representations of experiences (e.g., screen & component designs) 
• Motion studies & interactive mockups
• Design system & style documentation (e.g., typography, color palettes, components, motion guidelines, interaction patterns)
• Conduct research; evaluate potential experiences and validate solutions with potential users via prototypes and other appropriate methods.

Delivery

The Senior Product Designer (contractor) role is responsible for collaborating with developers to ensure experience quality and successful delivery. Expect to:

• Collaborate with developers to identify important UI constraints at a project’s outset (e.g., frameworks used, data constraints).
• Support developer needs during sprints.
• Collaborate with developers to find viable design workarounds when the team encounters development challenges.
• Work with developers and the QA team to ensure design intent is fully realized in the delivered experience.
• Deliver well-crafted design documentation that makes it easy for a future team to edit and extend the experience (e.g., clean files, clearly and consistently named layers and components, annotations provided where needed).
• Collaborate with clients to make sure they know how to work with and build upon the designs you’ve created.

Project Operations & Leadership

The Senior Product Designer (contractor) role helps drive the design aspects of client engagements in collaboration with VGV design leadership. They are responsible for collaborating with program and product management team members to help plan and manage design work. Expect to:

• Participate in and lead design discussions and reviews with clients.
• Work closely with design leadership to establish the design vision and the best ways to communicate with clients.
• Collaborate with program management to identify design activities, tasks and time required to accomplish project goals.
• Work with clients and VGV product managers to help define and refine design-specific requirements.
• Contribute to requirements definition, especially where they affect design.
• Participate in all relevant project ceremonies (e.g., stand-ups, sprint planning, retrospectives) and clearly communicate the status of your work.
• Support business development opportunities as they arise on your program.
• Mentor more junior designers to help them develop their craft.

Qualifications

Experience

• 4+ years of UX/UI digital product design experience in either an agency or in-house setting.
• Experience shipping digital products, especially mobile and web applications.
• Experience working on multi-platform experiences (e.g., mobile, tablet, desktop, embedded) preferred.

Portfolio

• A strong portfolio of work showcases excellence in interaction design, visual design, and problem solving; clearly demonstrating individual contributions to shipped products, impact on users and business objectives, and your personal design sensibilities.

Core Skills

• Visual & UI Design: Expert in the careful, systematic use of gestalt principles, color, typography, imagery and iconography to communicate clearly and set the emotional tone of an experience. Familiarity with implementation constraints and accessibility requirements. Experience creating and defending divergent visual design directions. Illustration skills, a plus.
• Motion Design: Proficient in bringing user interfaces to life with motion. Experience creating animated microinteractions is key; broader motion graphics and animation experience, and/or experience working with 3D assets, a plus. Bonus points for familiarity with Rive.
• UX Design: Proficient in innovating and leveraging human-centered interaction design and information architecture best practices to deliver useful, usable and desirable experiences. Fluent in translating stakeholder goals, user research, and complex user flows into simple UIs. 
• Systems Design: Competent in documenting interaction details, visual design specifications, and QA of the implemented product. Proficient in defining standards for managing design at scale, using reusable components and patterns, and considering the end users of a design system, along with client and user context, ensuring usability, maintainability, and adoption. 
• Research: Competent collaborating with UX researchers to gather qualitative and quantitative evidence to support design decisions. Understands how research data measures success of the work and informs design decisions. Experience with design thinking activities and workshop facilitation is a plus.
• Product Strategy: Competent in shaping a point of view based on research and product inputs. Competent at using product strategy insights to inform decisions and ensure product success. Familiar with various UX success metrics and how to support them in designs. 
• Creative Leadership: Competent in defending the design vision, communicating the rationale behind design decisions, and influencing clients. Able to showcase work in a compelling, clear, and concise way. Able to handle complex client feedback and requirements, and iterate on concepts accordingly.

Tools

• Mastery in Figma, our core design tool; including prototyping features.
• Experience with higher-fidelity prototyping tools such as ProtoPie or Framer is preferred.
• Experience with presentation tools such as Google Slides or Powerpoint is preferred.

Tech Literacy

• General tech literacy; working understanding of front-end development concepts; familiarity with variations in screens sizes, OSes, and device capabilities.
• Able to collaborate with engineers and clearly communicate design intent in ways they can understand.
• High-level experience building interfaces in Flutter or other front end frameworks (e.g., React) is a plus.

Communication

• Full professional fluency in English (C1 level or superior).
• A proven ability to present your work, defend your decisions and clarify feedback live with English-speaking clients.
• Strong ability to communicate ideas to designers, engineers, product managers, and leadership through storytelling, visuals, and presentations.

Collaboration

• Able to work independently and in a team environment.
• Able to participate in the team's communications channels and ceremonies. 
• Proficient in collaborating with product owners, project managers and other decision making stakeholders.
• Proficient in synthesizing feedback into actionable to-dos and providing clear, actionable, and productive feedback.

Cognitive Traits

• Passionate about designing great software experiences.
• Curiosity and being a quick study; able  to rapidly ingest new information from a client, synthesize it for others, and turn it into design ideas.
• Detail orientation.
• Holistic systems thinking bias; a clear drive to bring order to your work. Able to incorporate user, business, and engineering perspectives into design decisions, easily identify dependencies, and consider costs and benefits on an issue-by-issue basis.

Working Style

• Able to consistently work on United States ET or CT time zones schedule (mandatory).
• Flexible and comfortable with ambiguity and change during a project.
• Comfort and experience working with multiple projects simultaneously.