Lead UX Designer

Role: Lead UX Designer

Location: Columbus, OH

Experience: 8 12+ years in UX/Product Design, including 3+ years leading legacy or mainframe application modernization initiatives in the Banking domain.

Key Responsibilities

Enterprise Discovery & Legacy Analysis

• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Architects, and Business stakeholders to understand business objectives, user needs, and modernization goals.
• Analyze legacy applications, including 3270/green-screen interfaces, COBOL/CICS transactions, business rules, workflows, and data models to identify modernization opportunities.
• Conduct user interviews, contextual inquiries, workflow observations, and stakeholder workshops to uncover usability challenges and business pain points.
• Facilitate Design Thinking workshops, journey-mapping sessions, and co-creation activities to align stakeholders on product vision and priorities.
• Translate business and technical requirements into actionable UX strategies and design opportunities.

UX Strategy & Experience Design

• Define UX strategy and experience vision for enterprise modernization programs.
• Create personas, empathy maps, customer journeys, task flows, service blueprints, and information architecture that inform product direction.
• Simplify complex enterprise workflows into intuitive, task-oriented digital experiences.
• Design enterprise dashboards, reporting solutions, analytics, search experiences, workflow management, and decision-support interfaces.
• Identify opportunities to incorporate AI-powered experiences such as intelligent search, workflow automation, recommendations, conversational interfaces, and predictive insights where they provide measurable business value.

UX Design & Prototyping

• Produce wireframes, user flows, interaction models, low- and high-fidelity prototypes, and production-ready UI specifications.
• Design responsive experiences optimized for desktop, tablet, and mobile platforms.
• Collaborate closely with Engineering to ensure accurate implementation of UX designs.
• Develop and maintain interaction standards, reusable patterns, and enterprise design system components.
• Create comprehensive design documentation and implementation guidelines.

Research, Validation & Continuous Improvement

• Plan and conduct usability testing, heuristic evaluations, accessibility reviews, and prototype validation sessions.
• Analyze user feedback, behavioral data, and research findings to continuously improve user experiences.
• Define UX success metrics and leverage analytics to measure product effectiveness and adoption.
• Advocate for evidence-based design decisions throughout the product lifecycle.

Accessibility & Design Quality

• Champion inclusive design and accessibility across all digital products.
• Ensure compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA (or higher) accessibility standards.
• Collaborate with Engineering to validate accessibility implementation and resolve usability issues.
• Establish UX quality standards and conduct design reviews to ensure consistency across modernization initiatives.

Leadership & Collaboration

• Lead end-to-end UX activities across multiple modernization workstreams.
• Mentor and guide UX designers, fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous learning.
• Partner with Product Managers, Architects, Engineers, Business Analysts, and QA teams throughout the Agile delivery lifecycle.
• Present design concepts, research findings, and strategic recommendations to executive leadership and key stakeholders.
• Balance user needs, technical feasibility, business objectives, and delivery timelines to drive informed design decisions.
• Promote UX best practices and contribute to the evolution of enterprise design maturity.

Required Skills & Experience

• 8+ years of professional UX/Product Design experience, including hands-on experience modernizing enterprise or legacy applications in the banking industry
• Demonstrated success leading UX initiatives for complex enterprise modernization programs.
• Strong expertise in UX research, Design Thinking, information architecture, interaction design, and usability testing.
• Proven experience designing complex, data-intensive enterprise applications, dashboards, analytics platforms, and workflow management systems.
• Strong understanding of enterprise application architecture, business process analysis, and workflow optimization.
• Experience designing within enterprise design systems and creating reusable UX patterns.
• Proficiency in Figma, FigJam, Sketch, Miro Photoshop, or equivalent design tools.
• Solid understanding of responsive design, accessibility standards (WCAG), and inclusive design principles.
• Experience working within Agile, Scrum, Lean UX, and Dual-Track Agile methodologies.
• Excellent communication, facilitation, and stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence technical and business audiences.
• Demonstrated leadership experience managing designers, coordinating cross-functional teams, and driving successful project delivery.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience modernizing mainframe applications, including COBOL, CICS, IMS, DB2, AS/400, or 3270 environments.
• Experience designing AI-powered enterprise applications, conversational interfaces, workflow automation, or intelligent decision-support systems.
• Familiarity with cloud migration and digital transformation initiatives.
• Experience establishing, scaling, or governing enterprise design systems.
• Knowledge of front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and component-based UI frameworks.
• Experience working in highly regulated industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare, Insurance, Government, or Manufacturing.

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Product Design, Interaction Design, Human Factors, Computer Science, Psychology, or a related field (or equivalent professional experience).