Senior UX Designer

Location: Lisbon, Portugal
We are seeking a Senior UX Designer to join our global UXD practice at Springer Nature and design within the Funder & Institutional Experience which sits within a substantial programme of work that publishes the latest scientific research to the world. 

This challenging opportunity would appeal to a seasoned UX designer that is interested in addressing complex, difficult problems with clear, user-centred experience designs.  

The role is based in Lisbon (Portugal) and you’ll be collaborating with colleagues there, as well as Berlin (Germany), London (UK), Pune (India) and other locations globally. Some travel may be required. 

Springer Nature is a global scientific publisher helping to advance science and accelerate solutions to address the world’s urgent challenges. With origins as far back as 1842 (Springer) and 1867 (Nature), content has been published from multiple nobel prize winners including Darwin and Einstein. Examples of published research include the first physical sequencing of the human genome to COVID-19 studies, making over 70k articles and books free to access.  

Some facts: 

• By 2025, there were 1.8 million research submissions with 420,000 articles published per year. 

• There are over 5 million articles in more than 3,000 scientific journals and 3 million chapters in more than 190,000 books. 

• Springer Nature is a leading publisher of Sustainable Development Goals content with more than 1 million articles and supports the SDGs in how we work - Springer Nature has been carbon neutral since 2020. 

Visit sndigital.springernature.com to learn more about who we are and what we do. 

To be successful in this role you will need to have the following: 

• Multi-year experience of UX Design in a senior capacity. 

• Accomplished critical thinking, analysis, sound decision-making and an outcomes driven mindset 

• Experience deploying applicable UX design and research methods and techniques. 

• Experience working with stakeholders and non-designers and have an empathetic, articulate and open communication style. 

• Experience running UX research independently, or in a leading role as part of a team. 

• Great user empathy and focus on creating value for them. 

• Preference to working in a collaborative (remote and in-person) team, where there is collective ownership of the product. 

• Good time management skills enabling you to collaborate with multiple teams on a variety of initiatives. 

• Comfortable getting involved with every stage of the UX lifecycle. 

• Awareness of your strengths and ability to recognise opportunities to learn and improve. 

This role is a terrific opportunity for friendly, curious people who want to get involved in our work and develop our culture and help make Springer Nature Digital a place where people and ideas can thrive. Responsibilities include: 

• Representing UX and championing users as part of a team that is responsible for institutions and funding within the payments and rights stage of the scientific publishing process. 

• Conduct discovery and analysis initiatives in collaboration with Product and other disciplines. 

• Identify pain points and opportunities and drive design conversations to address them. 

• Collaborate with stakeholders and team members and facilitate discussions to ensure focus remains on users 

• Create relevant UX deliverables including screen flows and wireframes, as well as designs for data visualisation 

Get settled: 

• Get to know Springer Nature as a business and the groups within it. 

• Understand the UX research that has been done and the context/history of it. 

• Become familiar with products/tools that the teams have been working on, how they do it and how it’s going. 

• Meet the stakeholders from across the business and understand their experience, background and ambitions. 

• Begin to work with your programme lead, colleagues within your immediate team and get to know your UX peers/community. 

Be involved: 

• Establish design thinking, prioritisation, reviews, alignment and delivery processes, keeping user-centred design as part of the team culture.  

• Ensure that design is informed by UX research. 

• Motivate and involve team members in UX research activities. 

• Share insights within your team, with the wider UX community and beyond. 

• Become an active participant of the UX community and become an example to others. 

Make a change and see your impact: 

• Know where there are gaps and assumptions in user knowledge. Know the relative risk and potential effort of each that is clearly laid out in a plan for the foreseeable future.  

• Identify impactful opportunities and work with leads to address those opportunities strategically 

• Ensure that strategic work with stakeholders is informed by UX research and design outcomes. 

• Become an advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), not just in what we deliver to our users but also in how we work together.