UX Designer - Contract

At Horizontal Digital, we hold ourselves to one key belief: You're only as good as your worst customer experience. This mantra drives our digital consultancy to think beyond the easy answers and create websites, apps, portals, and other experiences that solve customer needs for Fortune 500 companies in intuitive and empathetic ways. We fuse strategy, data, design, and technology together to arrive at solutions that set the bar higher for everyone.

We use these values to fuel superior results:

1. Lock arms: We forge relationships that make our impact 1,000x stronger, working across departments and engaging both our clients and our communities to deliver the greatest good.
2. Show Hustle: We anticipate opportunities, collectively roll up our sleeves, and find ways to execute the exceptional.
3. Embrace change: We welcome the unexpected and constantly anticipate what's next.
4. Elevate empathy: We listen before we take action, understanding a variety of perspectives and holding ourselves to a higher standard of accountability.
5. Never settle: We motivate each other to push past the easy answers and collectively arrive at bigger, more inspiring ideas.

We are looking for a highly skilled UX Designer to support our growing client needs and demands by discovering, researching, designing, and defining UX solutions for our customers.

What you'll do:

• Demonstrate a strong understanding of user-centered design principles and techniques and advocate for them across the organization.
• Build a deep level of trust with our clients.
• Constantly look for tools and processes that will make us more efficient and elevate our work.
• Plan and facilitate research activities (both user and stakeholder) and UX design workshops with stakeholders, build design artifacts necessary to conduct concept testing/usability testing, and produce reports.
• Be accountable for defining key user interface behaviors through the use of experience models, personas, storyboards, site maps, flow diagrams, wireframes, mockups, interactive prototypes, simulations, service blueprints, etc., and be comfortable presenting that thinking to our clients.
• Translate customer insights into tangible design deliverables within defined timelines. Think beyond boundaries to create design direction.
• Develop and maintain user interaction design guidelines as part of our clients' larger UX design system initiatives.
• Develop and/or use appropriate UX design and evaluation processes and/or efficiency and cost measurements to ensure that any design solution meets or exceeds defined needs and strategies.
• Be willing to drive new ideas and find simple and powerful ways to communicate them.
• Collaborate with other internal disciplines (strategists, UI designers, writers, business analysts, front-end developers, back-end developers, PMs) throughout our agency, as well as client stakeholders, to deliver innovative and effective user experience solutions to our clients and ultimately their customers.

Who you are:

• Bold - you understand how to be bold and innovative to push the boundaries of digital.
• Passionate - you are passionate about understanding and improving the end-to-end digital experience.
• Courageous - you aren't afraid to fail and are open to feedback.
• Curious - you have a desire to learn and enjoy research.
• Collaborative - you seek out collaboration and want to grow by being pushed each day to stretch your capabilities.
• Proficient - you have a strong portfolio that demonstrates your thoughtful approach to the entire UX process and your capabilities.
• Connected - you're plugged into the local UX community and actively seek inspiration.

What you bring:

• Great portfolio of customer experience examples and storytelling, featuring user research activities, audience definition and experience mapping, site/app mapping, wireframing, prototyping, and functional spec writing.
• 5+ years experience as a UX professional, skilled in human-centered design; able to demonstrate expertise in both information architecture and digital interactive experience design for component-driven, responsive web and mobile applications.
• Proven experience owning projects from start to finish.
• Ability to lead UX workshops with team members and clients.
• Experience using research and data to guide your recommendations.
• Experience designing complex and/or task-based applications for content-heavy and transactional websites.
• Proficiency with Figma. Sketch and Adobe Creative Cloud experience is a plus.
• Experience with presentation/prototyping tools like Figma, InVision, Marvel, Axure, Adobe XD, HTML/JS/CSS, or other tools.
• Knowledge of best practices for UX and interaction design for responsive experiences.
• An understanding of accessibility design issues.

You'll get extra credit for:

• Experience designing for content management systems (Sitecore, Acquia).
• Agile process experience.
• Requirements gathering and analysis experience.
• Mobile app design experience.