NPR is building a team of voice experts to continue exploring the frontiers of interactive news and storytelling on Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and other voice-driven platforms. As Product Designer for Voice Platforms, you’ll lead user experience and conversation design for our Skills, Actions, and Apps. This role represents design on multidisciplinary project teams, working with designers, product managers, developers, and editorial. You’ll use a wide range of design skills across the complete lifecycle of the product design process, from concept development to prototyping to user testing to final interaction polish to iteration and refinement. You’ll be entrepreneurial in your approach, confident in your design instincts, committed to experimentation and iteration, as you’ll design interactions that do not yet exist. Your job is to help inform product vision and foster positive experiences on voice platforms for millions of NPR consumers.
Responsibilities
- Design conversation flows and interaction patterns for voice-based experiences.
- Plan, wireframe, prototype and refine multimodal interfaces to accompany voice interactions (e.g., Echo Show and Google Assistant Smart Displays).
- Plan and execute qualitative user research studies for new and existing voice products, and make recommendations for change.
- Distill complex interactions into clear, understandable design solutions and communicate them to stakeholders.
- Help create end-to-end design experiences, interaction models and design systems.
- Work closely with interaction designers, developers, and audience research analysts to transform data into defensible design solutions.
- Help tell the story of our product user experiences through storyboarding, user journeys, and other storytelling methods.
- Collaborate daily with teammates as passionate about user experience as you are.
- Work in a highly efficient, interactive design process using minimal documentation to support your vision.
- Work closely with developers to help build prototypes and refine working products.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelors in a design-related field (e.g., interaction design, product design, human computer interaction, cognitive psychology) or practical experience in conversation design, smart home experiences, natural language interfaces, or equivalent experiences.
- 4+ years of experience as a professional product designer or equivalent practical experience.
- 1 year of experience working experiences for voice/conversational platforms.
- Excellent writing skills and a deep understanding of conversational flow.
- Fluent in all things digital design, including mastery of Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, HTML5, CSS3, accessibility, and cross-platform compatibility best practices.
- Experience designing across multiple devices and contexts (desktop, mobile, accessories).
- Above-average understanding of storytelling and a passion for editorial and NPR content.
- Tireless advocate for the user.
Desired Qualifications
- 5+ years of experience as a professional conversation designer, product designer or equivalent practical experience.
- 2+ years of experience working experiences for voice/conversational platforms or smart home products.
- Experience with qualitative usability testing.
- Proven track record of designing and helping to ship successful products and services.
- Experience working in an agile project methodology.
- Digital prototyping and coding skills.
- An active curiosity for emerging technologies, and contribute relevant findings back to the NPR team.
- Passion for telling compelling stories about your work and presenting it confidently to stakeholders.
- Excellent organizational skills.
You must submit a cover letter and portfolio along with your application. Your portfolio should include examples of flows that you’ve designed for speech-enabled interaction.
NPR offers a competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits package including health and wellness benefits, retirement, and work/life balance programs, as well as opportunities for career growth and development.
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NPR is an Equal Opportunity Employer that affirmatively seeks to hire veterans and people with disabilities. All applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex or national origin.