Product Designer; Temporary

Job Description

As a UW employee, you have a unique opportunity to change lives on our campuses, in our state and around the world. UW employees offer their boundless energy, creative problem-solving skills, and dedication to build stronger minds and a healthier world.

UW faculty and staff also enjoy outstanding benefits, professional growth opportunities and unique resources in an environment noted for diversity, intellectual excitement, artistic pursuits, and natural beauty.

UW's
Office of Research Information Services (ORIS)
has an outstanding opportunity open for a
Temporary
Product Designer.

The Product Designer is responsible for contributing user-centered experience design to the Office of Research’s software portfolio. This role is involved from formative research and ideation through high-fidelity design, user testing, and post-release evaluation. A broad base of human-centered design skills inform the Product Designer’s deep understanding of user and business needs. This role helps to ensure products are useful and usable, bringing simplicity and clarity to administration in the University‘s complex, world-leading research enterprise.

The Product Designer serves as a voice of the user and an advocate for user-centered design, helping ensure that systems used throughout the research lifecycle support effective, efficient, and accessible administration of research projects.

This role complements other designers, business analysts, product managers, and back-, front-, and data engineers on the Product team. Beyond the Product team, Product Designers collaborate closely with data analysts, communications, and customer experience. It is essential for this role to be motivated by the challenge of the research administration domain, which requires Product staff to absorb large bodies of information about process, policy, compliance, and formal guidance.

The role interacts frequently with users from business and administrative units throughout the University.

The Product Designer asks good questions and approaches problems with a detail-oriented, practical curiosity. The role collaborates with others to craft and execute effective, concise UX Research plans to address product risks with actionable insights. Within a particular product scope, the Product Designer then synthesizes findings with information from multiple other sources, translating insights into clear design artifacts and specifications. Individuals in this role must be able to communicate design concepts in a wide range of methods and choose the appropriate medium in any given situation.

This position has a direct impact on the University’s research mission by reducing the burden of administration required to prepare, submit, and manage research projects. It enables a fast pace of high-demand improvements to systems used throughout the research lifecycle, especially improvements to ORIS system integrations with Workday.

By bringing a user-centered perspective to complex research administration systems and collaborating across the Product team and partner units, the Product Designer helps create more understandable, efficient tools for the University’s research community, supporting the success and competitiveness of the institution’s world-leading research enterprise.

The Product Designer is expected to contribute to both design and research, but may have an area of specialty in one or the other. Responsibilities for a given role may emphasize one specialty based on team need and candidate experience.

• Drive full-cycle product design activities for assigned products and features, from discovery through detailed interaction design and post-release testing.

• Conduct user experience research (e.g. user interviews, surveys, usability testing, focus groups) in an agile product development environment to support timely, user-responsive design.

• Write clear, comprehensible UX research reports describing activities conducted, analysis, findings, and design recommendations.

• Collaborate with analysts and senior designers to leverage quantitative data (e.g. web analytics, surveys, support trends) to…