Senior UX Designer

Overview

Springer Nature has a portfolio of over 3,000 peer-reviewed journals and books across all areas of research. This role is part of the Shared Services domain and sits within the Global User Experience Design practice at Springer Nature, part of Springer Nature Digital that is the area of IT focused on product development.

The role is based in Pune (India) and works with colleagues in Pune, London (UK), Lisbon (Portugal) and Berlin (Germany).

What you will be doing

You will work collaboratively with developers, business analysts, product owners and others in order to iteratively deliver and refine the end solution, whilst helping to develop the UX vision and direction for our services.

As you will be expected to ensure that your work contributes to the overall improvement of the experience researchers have, you will work with other designers across the wider digital group.

Within 3 months

In the first three months, you will be getting to know the business, your colleagues, our customers and the problems your product aims to address. You will work on visualising concepts to help try out the ideas that have been formulated based on what we know so far to help form the next step towards the product objectives  

• Understand the goals of the team, priorities and the business drivers behind them.
• Delve into our user research and gain an understanding of the challenges we need to solve for our users.
• Work with your team to design experiences that meet the needs of our customers in a way that also helps to satisfy business goals.
• Work with the UX Researcher in the domain to understand the main researcher tasks and how this relates to what we can offer as a business.
• Develop relationships with other key areas of the business, e.g. customer services, the identity teams, brand etc. by including them in your working processes.
• With your team, learn about the competitor landscape and articulate how our approach fits in.
• Audit the information architecture and content of our websites and advise on problem areas.

3-6 months

• Apply a lean and experimental approach to potential ideas and solutions that may improve the user’s experience - from concept testing designs with users, to doing the work needed to deliver something new and assess its performance.
• Understand, evaluate and improve our experience metrics to ensure they really do reflect the usefulness of the experience.
• Align the design and delivery work in the content team to clear user and business goals and show this in a digestible way.
• Continue and improve the regular user research sessions and identify efficient ways to socialise the results within the domain and outside of IT.
• Be able to articulate why the approach to analysis, as well as the design decisions being made, are important for the business, in order to support buy-in from important colleagues and stakeholders.
• Help to build an information architecture strategy that fits in with the vision for our platform and how it serves our customers and the business.

6 months and beyond

• Establish routines for ensuring the experience is on track to meet the goals of your team and the wider goal to improve the experience researchers have with our research platforms.
• Be involved in strategy planning sessions that help shape the product and its direction,  by being the voice of, and expert on the user, through your design and research work.
• Review objectives with your UX Lead to plan appropriately for the next 12 month period.

Daily Delivery

You will:

• Work with developers and other disciplines to create a lightweight and rapid delivery process.
• Produce and share designs with teams, aligned with product requirements.
• Focus on building strong working relationships with distributed teams.
• Ensure there is a collaborative approach to the design process.

User Research responsibilities

At Springer Nature we believe user research is critical to a successful design and part of the role of all UX designers and product teams. You will work with UX researchers but you will also be directly responsible for your own research, collaborating and supporting each other where appropriate. The domain researcher will support and work with you in designing and establishing a research program that validates the design decisions and assumptions, uncovers unmet needs and helps to direct product decisions.

You will:

• Apply relevant research methods depending on the project schedules and deadlines.
• Work closely with the Research Ops team to create and update a panel of users for your project.
• Organise, run and analyse the sessions with users.
• Collaborate with the team to validate the design hypothesis about user behaviours and attitudes.
• Motivate and involve the team members in the research activities.
• Share insights within the product team, focussing them on making improvement based of these insights

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At Springer Nature, we value the diversity of our teams and work to build an inclusive culture, where people are treated fairly and can bring their differences to work and thrive. We empower our colleagues and value their diverse perspectives as we strive to attract, nurture and develop the very best talent.

Springer Nature was awarded Diversity Team of the Year at the 2022 British Diversity Awards. Find out more about our DEI work here.

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