About Us:
The Common Application is a not-for-profit member organization of more than 700 leading colleges and universities in the United States and around the world. Since 1975, The Common Application has been committed to the pursuit of access, equity, and integrity in the college admission process. Each year, nearly 1 million students use the Common Application online system to submit more than 4 million applications.
Summary:
The Common Application has a unique opportunity for a UX designer with a passion for creating experiences that ignite innovation and unravel complex problems. The ideal individual for this role should be driven by design thinking and excited about reaching deep and wide to understand the challenges that students, families, counselors, and colleges face during the college admissions process. We are looking for someone with a mind for strategy and an eye for design who is creative, curious, self-motivated, resourceful, and above all, a collaborative team-player.
- Utilize proven user research and design thinking methodologies to develop world-class designs and experiences for students, recommenders, and member college users.
- Build and maintain external relationships that will be leveraged for user testing activities, usability studies, focus group sessions, and other research-gathering methods.
- Be an evangelist of user needs throughout the project lifecycle by communicating through thoughtful discussion, wireframes, charts and graphs, and mockups, as well as traditional narratives.
- Facilitate collaborative, information-gathering sessions incorporating proven research methodologies such as storyboarding, interviews, surveys, card sorting activities, persona/scenario development, and input workshops with internal and external stakeholders.
- Leverage meaningful data-driven insights from qualitative and quantitative research to provide product/design recommendations.
- Proactively seek out and identify research opportunities that bring new and deeper insights to project initiatives.
- Translate research results into experience requirements and work with visual designer to high quality deliverables; Work closely with product and technology team.
- Conceptualize original ideas that bring simplicity and user friendliness to complex design roadblocks
- Stay informed of education landscape, competitive products, and industry trends.
- Collaborate with a wide variety of functional areas such as service, support, engineering, development, and operations to develop and provide product experiences responsive to constituent needs and organizational priorities.
Requirements:
- Bachelor’s degree in Information Design, Human Factors, or related discipline preferred. Five or more years of applied experience in experience design.
- Comprehensive understanding of design approaches, technologies, and tools (including personas, journey maps, information architecture, wireframes/clickthroughs, functional prototypes, user flows, etc.).
- Strong organization and analytic thinking skills, with ability to plan, conduct, research, analyze and synthesize qualitative and quantitative research results into user scenarios, design strategy, and business requirements.
- Exceptional written and oral communication skills including visualization, communication design, report writing and presentation for technical and non-technical individuals at all levels.
- Proficient in the use of tools to document and communicate findings, including Microsoft Office, Google tools, and Adobe Creative Suite.
- High level of creativity and design experience; familiarity with visual design concepts and tools; ability to create wireframe and prototype using tools such as Balsamiq, Axure, InVision, etc.
- Understanding of the technology behind mobile and web development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.).
- Experience with Google Analytics and database structures for uncovering quantitative data.
- Ability to put aside personal opinions and biases and truly listen and understand user needs and desires.
Benefits:
We value our employees’ time and efforts. Our commitment to your success is enhanced by our competitive salary and an extensive benefits package including paid time off, medical, dental and vision benefits and future growth opportunities within the organization. Plus, we work to maintain the best possible environment for our staff, where people can learn and grow. We strive to provide a collaborative, creative workplace where each person feels encouraged to contribute to our processes, decisions, planning and culture.