Senior UX Designer

Full-Time England, United Kingdom
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Senior UX Designer – Content Acquisition Domain

We’re looking for a Senior UX Designer to join our growing global UX team at Springer Nature, to work on the Content Acquisition Domain. The job is based in Kings Cross, London and you’ll work with colleagues in Berlin, Dordrecht, and Pune (India), so expect some travel.

Visit sndigital.springernature.com to learn more about who we are and what we do.

The Role

You will be responsible for ensuring the user experience is consistent and user-focused across complex publishing workflows, for our world famous journals.You will need to develop a deep understanding of the products and the peer review process to advocate for our users and their needs. You can expect to be conducting global research to discover the requirements of stakeholders, as well as journal editors and scientific writers who will be involved in using the process.

You’ll join a team that is working to replace legacy publishing tools and products with new solutions built in house, and work collaboratively with at least one other UX Designer.

The foundation of this interesting but complex workflow has recently been established, and you’ll need to be ready to hit the ground running; guiding and defining how that foundation now shapes and scales into the future user experience of scientific manuscript submission and peer review across Springer Nature journals. You aren’t phased by change or “failing fast”  – you should expect to be building solutions to user needs iteratively and quickly.

What you’ll be doing:

Within 3 months

  • Immerse yourself in the world of professional research and the business domain to understand the programme of work  – proactively gathering knowledge and insight from your team and peers
  • Understand our user’s goals, and key areas to explore and investigate
  • Gain a deep understanding of the complex workflows and any research done to date, identifying any gaps
  • Establish and develop good relationships with your product team, key stakeholders and the wider UXD practice  – make lots of new friends!
  • Show your product team how design helps support a lean and iterative development approach

Within 6 months

  • Apply your understanding of publishing, the marketplace and competitor landscape, and gather insights to help drive product development
  • Challenge the status quo, with succinct and accessible user insight and/or data to influencing stakeholders, development & product teams
  • Consult regularly with stakeholders, and team members to understand business requirements, technical issues, and the requirements of those using the process
  • In conjunction with the domain UX lead, help establish UX KPIs for the domain and communicate how you are evaluating the effectiveness of the user experiences
  • In conjunction with the UX lead and Research Lead, help share and socialise our research better to make it more accessible for all
  • Help stakeholders build a better understanding about UX activities and and user research and how it moves the programme to delivering excellent user experiences.
  • Pair with frontend developers and brand designers to continually evolve our new design system and validate development and design work
  • Monitor new developments in the user experience field, and be aware of ways in which you can incorporate them into the work

Within 12 months

  • Influence and input into the vision of how researchers, primary investigators and academics get their work published in the future
  • Have identified key growth points and develop a strategy for the future of the product’s usability
  • Have developed strong working relationships with key stakeholders across the project, utilising those relationships to improve team communication and discover new avenues for enhancing the product

Delivery responsibilities

  • Work with your product owner, business analysts and developers and other team members to build solutions to user needs iteratively and quickly
  • Participate in daily stand-ups with your development team
  • Collaboratively design, test, and develop solutions with your team
  • Have daily conversations with your product owner, business analysts and business contacts and work with them to design and run collaborative workshops with our stakeholders, customers, and users
  • Define and validate hypotheses about what is valuable to our users
  • Design products that are reliable and feel lightweight and ensure that users can still achieve their goals quickly and easily

User research responsibilities
You will be directly responsible for research throughout the life cycle of the project. Our research lead will support you in designing and establishing a research programme to validate design decisions instead of designing through assumption.

You will:

  • Develop a research plan. You’ll do this in conjunction with your leads (UX, Research), business analysts and product owner to explore, understand and make sense of the domain
  • Work with our research lead to create and keep updated a panel of users
  • Recruit, organise, plan, and run workshops, studies and research activities
  • Share findings within the project, programme, and design team
  • Get the team involved in research activities where feasible