Description
Product Designers at CivicPlus are responsible for contributing to the design and development of our products. They collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to create intuitive and visually appealing user interfaces that align with business goals. Working under the guidance of Senior Product Designers and Product Design Managers, they are involved in all aspects of the design process, including research, ideation, wire-framing, prototyping, and iterating based on user feedback, directly impacting the user experience and ensuring our products meet the needs of our customers.
Contractor Responsibilities:
- Lead all aspects of the design process within a single product line or team to frame problems, research use cases and users, define insights, share your vision, prototype, and document for engineer collaboration.
- Partner with product managers, engineers, and leadership to craft useful, delightful product experiences that solve user pain, drive product growth, and meet measurable outcomes.
- Develop and present high-level research, journey-maps, user-flows, mockups, and/or prototypes to effectively communicate ideas.
- Track product usage data and metrics to validate designed solutions post-launch and work with product managers to organize and prioritize iterative solutions.
- Understand the basic principles of visual design fundamentals and know how to deploy and when to deviate from them to meet and match the current product requirements.
- Attend all required product pod and design team meetings and willing to contribute to promoting product design culture at CivicPlus.
Contractor Requirements:
Experience
- 2+ years experience designing and delivering user-centered experiences in collaboration with engineers.
- Experience working on a SaaS based product (B2B or government based business a plus)
- Experience leading end to end product design decisions from early concept to product launch.
- Empathy with an understanding of user needs and passion for designing beautiful, functional software products.
- Understanding of how to prototype at the appropriate degrees of fidelity to solicit clear customer feedback.
- Comfort with an iterative design process that includes accepting and acting on feedback, along with humility and a deep appreciation of feedback
- Ability to conduct user research and translate insights from customer interviews, usability tests and site metrics into actionable design solutions in collaboration with senior designers.
- Proficiency with design and research software (e.g. Figma, Dovetail, Maze, or other applicable programs)
Additional skills/knowledge*:
Hands on Accessibility knowledge
- Knowledge and understanding of how your intended designs meet WCAG 2.2 standards and can communicate why.
- Ability to document accessibility needs including things like focus order, heading levels, alt text, etc. utilizing modern design documentation tools and practices.
- Can confidently speak with and help developers work through accessibility challenges and can spot accessibility failures within the design review/QA process.
Design System thinking and practice
- Make sure designs are reusable and scalable and take a component first approach.
- Able to work within the boundaries of CivicPlus branding and design language standards.
- Knowledgeable about the benefits design system / component library approaches to product development and can confidently advocate this approach to a cross functional team.
Build within an already active product
- Able to work within a product that already has customers and UX decisions baked into everyday usage and understand how/when to work within those constraints and how/when to push for changes.
- Understand the landscape and challenges designing products for municipal staff who use them to help residents. (B2B2C)
- Collaborate with Product colleagues on how to incorporate, sunset, or change current features and functions customers use in the current product within the new design.
Work collaboratively with offshore/contracted development team
- Have experience or understand an approach to challenges working with engineering teams asynchronously and remotely, in different time zones.
- Able to use various forms of communication that most effectively helps your team understand design decisions, provide feedback, and conduct design reviews.
*Even if you do not have direct experience with all of these scenarios, we encourage you to apply.
Contract Specifications:
- Job Title: Product Designer Contract (1099 Independent Contractor)
- Job Type: 1099 Independent Contractor
- Benefits: Not eligible
- Hours per week: 40
- Contract Length: 2 years
- Location: Remote
We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all qualified individuals and will make reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities during the interview process. If you require an accommodation, please let us know in advance so we can make appropriate arrangements. We welcome and encourage candidates of all abilities to apply for this position.
