Director, User Experience, Silicon Valley, CA

Opportunity

An exciting opportunity with a great company funded by two Silicon Valley marquee Venture Capital firms. This young three year old company provides a much needed Web service that has already gotten a lot of attention from the mainstream media, including Today Show, BBC, CNN, CBS, Forbes, 20/20, Good Morning America, Wall Street Journal, Fox, NPR, Washington Post and others. In addition to our high-profile financial backers, an Ivy League Management Team, charismatic founder, central Silicon Valley location, spacious headquarters, great working environment, and fun culture and we offer an opportunity to ride the next wave of innovation in Web-based services.

We are looking for a top-notch highly motivated energetic self-starter User Experience professional to join our company and build a UX Design team. 
We are looking for a unique combination of a hands-on major thought leader with management responsibilities. The ideal candidate has been a Sr. UX professional or a UX Lead, has had responsibilities for innovative, complex projects, managed people and or a team and is now looking for additional professional and management challenges.  

This is a great opportunity to become a core part of the leadership team in a completely new space, build your own UX team , get in early with significant financial upside, and have fun doing it with an amazing group of people!

This is a full time position in company’s headquarters located mid Peninsula Silicon Valley. 

Job Description

Summary:
Director of User Experience will be the visionary, team leader, and voice of the customer experience within the organization.

Director of User Experience will act as a direct contributor, as well as manage a small team to deliver:

• User research and usability
• User Interaction and design
• Visual design

Director of User Experience will be responsible for taking the next generation product vision for the full suite of company’s products and turning it into a design and functional reality.

This position will report to the Sr. Director, Product Management.  This role will heavily partner with Product Management, QA, Engineering, Customer Support, and Marketing.

 
Detailed Role Description:
The primary role of Director of User Experience is to define an overarching, holistic vision for the visual and interactive experience of the company’s products, and partner with Product Management and Engineering to bring this vision to reality.

Director of User Experience will define the company “story”, identify core customer types and needs, and transform unmet customer needs and business opportunities into successful product designs.

Strategy:
• Develop and drive long-term user experience strategy
• Tightly partner with product management to develop the face and interactions of all product roadmap initiatives
• Understand the needs of internal and external customers, the business, and the competitive landscape – through data-driven analysis and strong research methodologies
• Establish methodologies for collecting customer feedback in all stages of product development (early conception, mid-creation, and post-launch)
• Be a key catalyst in driving a culture of innovation and teamwork centered around the needs of our customers
• Provide design direction and creative leadership to deliver features that continuously delight customers

Execution:
• Build and manage a small team of part or full time UI contributors
• Partner with Product Management leads on a daily basis
• Interact with other key organizational leads, collaboratively driving necessary discussions, decisions, and outcomes.
• Manage projects running concurrently on multiple tracks from planning through launch.
• Produce all necessary wireframes, mockups, prototypes, graphic elements, etc. needed to design and launch products.
• Identify and prioritize existing usability issues and define solutions to address them
• Act as the “voice of the customer” across all internal discussions and decisions that impact user experience

This role will require staying abreast of the rapidly changing technologies and approaches in web and e-commerce in general, and in the areas of SaaS, social networking, and search engines in particular.

This person will be a major thought leader in the organization and must be capable of highly innovative, highly collaborative problem solving in a fast-changing and growing environment.

Skills Required:

• Minimum 7 years experience as web-related lead UI designer, preferably consumer-facing and transaction-oriented products
• Degree in human interface design, interaction design, human-computer interaction, or information design. Advanced degree in these fields a plus.
• Excellent understanding of user experience design for the web, technology trends, demonstrable design skills, and ability to show relevant work.
• Experience with formal design, usability, and research methodologies.
• Excellent understanding of web technologies and how to work with developers to leverage them.
• Extensive experience with generating wireframes, static and dynamic prototypes, and other mockup methods.
• Motivated self-starter, with a high capacity for rapid learning. Ability to independently own complex problems and deliver great solutions.
• Strong leadership skills and an ability to mentor and groom other designers.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills. Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, high-performance, team-oriented environment.
• Expert with:
o Photoshop
o Illustrator
o Flash
• Strong understanding of (but coding not required for this position):
o HTML
o CSS
o Javascript
o Ajax

Education:
Degree in human interface design, interaction design, human-computer interaction, or information design. Advanced degree in these fields a plus.

Previous Experience:
Consumer-facing Web-based Services companies: Yahoo, Google, Yelp, Facebook, Amazon, eBAY, PayPal, Intuit, AOL, etc.

Compensation:
A competitive compensation package, benefits.  

CONTACT INFORMATION

Natasha Krol
Managing Partner
Alexander & Krol Executive Search, LLC
1325 Howard Avenue, # 326
Burlingame, CA 94010
natasha@alexanderandkrol.com
phone 650.759.8252
fax     208.712.0241