Role: Senior UX Designer/Researcher
Location: Remote
Role - Candidate has to be authorized and located in the country.
The client is seeking a highly skilled, communication-focused Senior UX Designer / Researcher to join our digital modernization team. We are looking for a dedicated user experience and user research specialist. Front-end development skills are entirely optional, though any coding ability serves as a welcome asset. In this position, you will closely collaborate with our lead UX/Accessibility Architect to scale high-quality digital standards across enterprise initiatives. You will possess specialized UX research capabilities that do not exist on the current team, taking ownership of user testing and UI optimization.
Purpose
- Pure UX research and design role. No coding expected.
- Graduates of ISU HCI (Human Computer Interaction) program highly desired.
Primary Focus
- UX research
- User-centered design
- User journey mapping
- Wireframes and prototypes
- Design recommendations
- Accessibility-first design
- Design documentation and annotations
Core Responsibilities
- User Experience Research: Design, plan, and execute formal user experience research to evaluate complex workflows, ensuring applications are intuitive and efficient for educators and state employees.
- Usability Testing: Moderate hands-on user testing sessions and run usability labs to actively identify and resolve workflow friction.
- Heuristic Evaluation: Audit early layouts and interfaces against usability best practices and design standards.
- User Journey & Persona Mapping: Translate complex district data reporting and environmental workflows into clear, intuitive user journeys and behavioral personas.
- Information Architecture: Structure massive, data-heavy reporting categories logically using techniques like card sorting.
- Accessibility Alignment: Integrate digital accessibility from the ground up, aligning design systems and user research with WCAG standards to ensure digital services are universally accessible to all Iowans.
- Collaborative Design: Partner with our lead Architect to scale technical user experience and research practices across multi-agency initiatives, chatbot interfaces, and global state projects.
- Clear Communication: Collaborate effectively with cross-functional agency teams, product owners, and technical stakeholders to clearly articulate design findings and research data.
Required Technical Skills & Qualifications
- Senior UX Design Expertise: Extensive experience designing responsive web application interfaces, wireframes, and interactive prototypes - 8+ years