Lead UX Designer

HMH is a learning technology company committed to delivering connected solutions that engage learners, empower educators and improve student outcomes. As a leading provider of K-12 core curriculum, supplemental and intervention solutions, and professional learning services, HMH partners with educators and school districts to uncover solutions that unlock students' potential and extend teachers' capabilities.

HMH serves more than 50 million students and 4 million educators in 150 countries. For more information, visit www.hmhco.com

The Lead UX Designer is the voice of the user within a product area, focused on creating an exceptional experience for educators, students, and families. They will create and drive exceptional experiences for the NWEA assessment space, playing a pivotal role in shaping the digital experience across multiple touchpoints. Using Design Thinking and Human-Centered Design approaches, they inspire others to achieve great things for those using our products and services. They partner with a multidisciplinary team toward creating a delightful experience, as well as guide and direct the team to focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. Experimentation, collaboration, a bias for action, and regular iteration are the keys to success in this role, helping to translate business objectives to testable hypotheses. They are an expert in harnessing the creative spirit and contributions of a diverse set of teammates. This role establishes a strategy for the execution of a valuable, usable, and delightful user experience. In doing so, they create a shared vision for the future, collaborating with other teams to accomplish that strategy, through internal storytelling, advocacy for roadmap priorities, and day to day tactical influence.

Design Strategy:

• Lead design strategy efforts within a project in order to collaboratively prioritize initiatives. This includes planning, facilitation, analysis, and execution of design.
• Provide mental models for others to understand the people behind the products and services NWEA offers.
• Improve the customer experience by eliminating pain points, reducing cognitive load, and simplifying the interactions between NWEA and the users of our products and services.

Ideation and Feedback:

• Develop and lead workshops / design sprints with SMEs and stakeholders to inform solutions, building and refining ideas collaboratively.
• Proactively seek out user feedback through interviews, observations, focus groups, and surveys to determine the long-term needs of the humans using our products and services.
• Integrate experience research into everything you do, including conducting your own research when needed.
• Take ownership of the design process, ensuring the execution of high-quality, usable designs, from initial user research to final visual designs delivered to development.

Collaboration:

• Coordinate with other Design Leads across the organization to ensure a great experience is felt throughout the customer's journey.
• Collaborate on product and service roadmap projects.
• Inspire a large team from diverse disciplines toward a common goal-to improve learning for all students, regardless of background, and the educators and families who support them through creating exceptional experiences.

Design Methodology:

• Implement design standards and guidelines throughout your direct team.
• Understand the intersection of design thinking, agile, lean, and systems thinking; explain these concepts to others, and teach new concepts when necessary.
• Teach and facilitate design principles throughout the organization.

Skills and Competencies:

• Deeply committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.
• Highly analytical; lives to solve problems; understands inclusive design and how to apply it.
• Experienced in leading others through a Human-Centered Design approach to problem-solving and in using Design Thinking to create innovative solutions.
• Demonstrates excellent information synthesis and real-time documentation skills.
• Confidence working across multiple teams and actively creating alignment.
• Proven experience creating production-ready UI designs and supporting Design Systems.
• Consistently engages teams with professionalism, confidence, and emotional intelligence.
• Skilled at helping teams clearly define problems and identify root causes.
• Possesses strong persuasion and negotiation skills; finds mutual ground and practical solutions.
• Instill trusts: Gains the confidence and trust of others through honesty, integrity, and authenticity.
• Communicates effectively: Develops and delivers multimode communications that convey a clear understanding of the unique needs of different audiences.
• Customer-focused: Builds strong customer relationships and delivers customer-centric solutions.
• Drives results: Consistently achieves results, even under tough circumstances.
• Business insight: Applying knowledge of business and the marketplace to advance the organization's goals.

Education and Experience:

• Minimum bachelor's degree in HCI, Human Factors, Information Design, Web Design, or related field, or comparable experience in the industry. An equivalent combination of education and experience will be considered in lieu of a degree.
• Strong portfolio showcasing the ability to integrate user research, personas, journeys, and touchpoints into cohesive experience ecosystems across multiple platforms.
• Experience facilitating collaboration that shepherds a team from a problem space to an agreed upon solution.
• Strong experience with UX tools such as Figma, Miro, Axure, and Jira. Familiarity with creating user journeys, wireframes, interactive prototypes, design specifications, and managing projects through Agile workflows.
• Minimum bachelor's degree in HCI, Human Factors, Information Design, Web Design, or related field, or comparable experience in the industry. An equivalent combination of education and experience will be considered in lieu of a degree.
• Strong portfolio showcasing the ability to integrate user research, personas, journeys, and touchpoints into cohesive experience ecosystems across multiple platforms.
• Experience facilitating collaboration that shepherds a team from a problem space to an agreed upon solution.

Salary Range:

• $103 - 135,000

The Information Technology organization is transforming to realize our mission: Become a leader in HMH's digital transformation, and as a strategic partner, innovate and deliver highest value, competitive advantage solutions across all corporate and business functions. Our ambition is to be a digital leader through innovation and develop and deliver leading edge technology such as robotic process automation and artificial intelligence to solve some of HMH's greatest operational business challenges. Our professionals will have business relevant skills to connect our HMH partners to technologies that propel the businesses to deliver the greatest value for HMH and our customers.

We are building a team of IT professionals with an insatiable appetite to learn, a relentless focus on customer service, a technological curiosity toward future possibilities, and a creativity in solving business challenges with leading technologies. Our team will find ways to work together, create a sense of community where it's safe to take risks and learn together, develop our careers, and all have an opportunity to work on new technologies. We will work together, learn together and have fun together. As a team, we will lead HMH's digital transformation.

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