UI/UX Human Centered Design Specialist

Job Overview We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Senior UI/UX Expert to join our dynamic team. The ideal candidate will be a UI/UX Subject Matter Expert with comprehensive expertise in Human-Centered Design (HCD) and design thinking. This role requires a candidate who can provide detailed and useful interface design specifications to development teams, ensuring the creation of intuitive, user-friendly applications. Key Responsibilities Provide subject matter expertise in UX design, offering strategic guidance grounded in Human-Centered Design and design thinking methodologies, including user research, personas, journey mapping, prototyping, mockups, and usability evaluation. Create and deliver a User Experience (UX) Research Plan and Outcomes for each use case, which shall include a research write-up documenting goals, anticipated outcomes, research questions, hypotheses, methodology, recruiting needs, synthesis, and next steps. Facilitate discovery activities, to include generative research with users and business stakeholders, an assessment of current related features, a content review, an information architecture review, an accessibility review, a business process review; and collection of any available data and analytics and provide in a User Experience Research Checklist. Partner with other Product Teams to ensure that the new tool or service fits into the existing structure. Lead the design and development of user interfaces for various applications, ensuring they are visually appealing, user-friendly, and efficient. Provide clear and actionable interface design specifications to development teams. Design dynamic forms and other complex UI components, including rich cards and drag & drop features. Define and maintain UX frameworks and templates for developers to use during the coding process. Apply insights from user experience research studies to describe product functionality, including epics and user stories, as well as operational, business, functional, technical, data, and integration requirements. Support design synthesis activities and generate insights and opportunities for improvement. Communicate research findings through a variety of formats (such as insight reports, stories, videos, storyboards, etc.) to maximize relevance and impact. Perform requirements analysis based on User Experience Research, obtaining stakeholder input from internal users and external users. Develop User Personas to represent user types that have wants and needs of our applications and products, and who might use our applications and products in a similar way. Create Customer and User Journey Maps and capture related data. Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including product owners, developers, and other designers. Conduct usability testing sessions to gather feedback on designs and apply results to refine designs. Write and edit plain language content for Development Teams. Design, test, and deliver low- and high-fidelity wireframes, prototypes, and interactive web forms, updating them as needed to support stakeholder collaboration, usability testing, facilitated demos, and iterative design improvements. Lead user testing sessions and conduct thorough analysis to inform design improvements. Establish and uphold design standards across project components. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure seamless integration of UI/UX designs. Work with ReactJS, JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Tailwind to develop and refine user interfaces. Design within a micro-service architecture to create scalable and maintainable solutions. Qualifications MA/MS plus 10+ years of general experience in information systems with 8+ years of specialized experience. HS (16+ years), AA/AS (14+ years), BA/BS (12+ years), Doctorate Degree/Ph.D. (9+ years) Experience in front-end development and specifically in ReactJS and JavaScript development. Familiarity with UX, information architecture, content strategy, and best practices in health literacy and user centered design. Experience in software engineering and design architectures. Experience with designing software to align to strategic business needs and goals. Experience in conducting research for advanced technologies to determining how IT can support business needs leveraging software, hardware, or infrastructure. Experience in Figma or other related design tool. Experience in usability testing tools. Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to think critically. Strong communication skills, with the ability to articulate design concepts and decisions to stakeholders. Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced environment. Proven track record of delivering scalable and reliable software solutions. A portfolio demonstrating expertise in UI/UX design and relevant projects. A bachelor’s degree in a related field with a minimum of (12) years of professional experience in a user focused production environment. Proven experience in designing dynamic forms with a strong emphasis on intuitive user experience and efficient design. Extensive experience in creating CSS cards and drag & drop functionality. Experience on UX strategy, user researcher, user interviews, surveys, and usability study. Builds personas, user journey map, empathy maps. Experience on UX analysis to conduct competitive analysis, market assessments and heuristic evaluations. Experienced in using user feedback to inform UX improvements and guide design decisions." Extensive hands-on experience in developing and testing wireframes and prototypes. Detailed knowledge of Section 508 requirements, and experience designing interfaces to be 508 compliant. Demonstrated ability to generate innovative solutions to complex design problems. Solid background in defining and maintaining design standards. Experience working with tools like Jira, Confluence extensively for work item tracking and documentation. Experience working in an agile environment with a knowledge of SAFe. Understanding of Agile methodologies. Compensation & Benefits The likely salary range for this position is $169,604 - $229,464. This is not, however, a guarantee of compensation or salary. Rather, salary will be set based on experience, geographic location and possibly contractual requirements and could fall outside of this range. Our benefits package for all US-based employees includes a variety of medical plan options, some with Health Savings Accounts, dental plan options, a vision plan, and a 401(k) plan offering the ability to contribute both pre and post-tax dollars up to the IRS annual limits and receive a company match. To encourage work/life balance, GDIT offers employees full flex work weeks where possible and a variety of paid time off plans, including vacation, sick and personal time, holidays, paid parental, military, bereavement and jury duty leave. GDIT typically provides new employees with 15 days of paid leave per calendar year to be used for vacations, personal business, and illness and an additional 10 paid holidays per year. Paid leave and paid holidays are prorated based on the employee’s date of hire. The GDIT Paid Family Leave program provides a total of up to 160 hours of paid leave in a rolling 12 month period for eligible employees. To ensure our employees are able to protect their income, other offerings such as short and long-term disability benefits, life, accidental death and dismemberment, personal accident, critical illness and business travel and accident insurance are provided or available. We regularly review our Total Rewards package to ensure our offerings are competitive and reflect what our employees have told us they value most. Equal Opportunity Employer / Individuals with Disabilities / Protected Veterans #J-18808-Ljbffr