User Experience Designer

Job Title: UX Designer Location: Remote/NYC (and surrounding areas), Charlotte, San Antonio, DC, Irvine Duration: 5 months+ contract Description No travel, but must be onsite for the first week. Best locations are NYC (and surrounding areas), Charlotte, San Antonio, DC, Irvine Key Responsibilities Understand the current state of the user experience by auditing existing designs, identifying user pain points, and aligning with product goals and technical constraints. Advocate for the user throughout the design process, ensuring solutions address real user needs and contribute to seamless, intuitive experiences. Collaborate with cross-functional teams including product managers, developers, compliance, and accessibility experts to align designs with business and regulatory requirements. Create and refine wireframes, prototypes, and visual assets to explore and communicate design ideas clearly to stakeholders. Support and apply user research to inform design decisions, validate concepts, and iterate based on feedback. Ensure consistency and usability by leveraging existing design systems, researching design patterns, and considering accessibility implications. Share and iterate on designs by gathering feedback from stakeholders, peer groups, and users to improve design quality and usability. Prepare designs for development handoff, including documentation, annotations, and accessibility considerations. Support the development process by answering questions, updating designs as needed, and participating in design reviews and walk-throughs. Track and evaluate design performance post-launch using data and feedback to inform future improvements and enhancements. Independently lead design efforts on moderately complex projects, balancing user needs with business and technical constraints with minimal supervision. Contribute to UX Department efforts and improvements to help UX refine and improve practices/offerings. Drive cross-functional collaboration and influence product/portfolio direction, guiding team/peers toward user-centered solutions while balancing business impact. Elevate design quality and serve as a leading contributor to UX Department efforts and improvements to help UX refine and improve practices/offerings. Adoption of AI-assisted design tools to enhance design efficiency and innovation. Lead cross-platform design efforts, including mobile, web, and voice interfaces, ensuring consistency and usability across channels. Influence product strategy by aligning design decisions with measurable business outcomes. Crafts effective and useable design concepts, interaction, and visual design artifacts with high attention to detail and accessibility standards. Ensures that delivered designs are consistent with appropriate design systems and contributes to and drives the continued enhancement, growth and adoption of design systems. Leads and facilitates design sprints and iterations, including the execution of design work within a design sprint, in collaboration with Product Management, UX and development partners. Provides constructive design feedback and guidance to other designers and sets the positive example to other designers for design critique. Proactively collaborates with and connects other designers in and outside of their product team on design patterns and approach across experiences. Leads and facilitates design strategy, concepting and definition activities including design thinking, service design blueprinting, journey mapping, user flow mapping and other UX methods. Delivers related artifacts. Collaborates closely with Product Managers and Product Owners as a leading voice speaking on behalf of the user to influence the direction of a product or experience and its associated roadmap. Communicates and collaborates closely with Design Core team on design system updates and implementation within products. Leads and facilitates the implementation of UX Chapter defined processes and best practices within product team. Educates and is an ambassador for UX processes and value on team. Influences, supports, and collaborates with a variety of UX disciplines across divisions to deliver high quality user experiences and achieve strategic business and UX goals. Requirements 7+ years professional design experience. Expert in a wide variety of UX Design methods and tools including user journey mapping, service design, design thinking, information architecture, low-fidelity design, high-fidelity design, design systems, accessibility in design, and prototyping. Experience delivering responsive design solutions for a variety of devices and form factors. Competencies in front-end development and collaborating closely with development partners. Ability to integrate vendor/third-party applications and propriety, "in house" products into a holistic user experience. Must be able to communicate with impact across multiple audiences at all levels including leaders, team members, and external vendors. Able to expertly establish and maintain effective relationships across departments, business areas, and vendors. Excellent leadership, collaboration, and motivational skills. Expert in organizational skills and managing self. Takes ownership for self-development and stays current with UX skills including UX Design techniques, tools, and best practices. Presents ideas, thoughts, arguments, and information persuasively and credibly. #J-18808-Ljbffr