Job: Product Designer at Igloo

Igloo’s goal is to help people communicate and collaborate in the workplace. This means creating simple but effective workflows to enable people to create content and a delightful experience for consuming and collaborating on it.  We need a design leader who fights for the user, sets a high bar for design in all of our products and is a champion for instilling a design culture in our business.

Our Ideal Candidate

You walk in the shoes of the user, think in experiences and are passionate about creating solutions that are intuitive and motivating. You understand that design and performance are not mutually exclusive and you know how to blend the two. And you love making interfaces that are easy to use and beautiful at the same time.

You use a spectrum of tools: personas, design sprints, customer journey maps, wireframes, and occasionally, the back of a napkin to help you design effective solutions to customer problems. You love taking rough ideas and iterating on them until they are a refined product that reinforces our brand and vision.

You enjoy working and collaborating with product managers, developers, testers and company leadership to create the best experiences for customers. You will question and gather feedback on designs, prototypes and demos to ensure they live up to a high standard. Above all else you are passionate about product design, the user, and designing delightful experiences.

Think you’re the right fit? Submit your re­sume including a link to your portfolio to careers@igloosoftware.com.

Key responsibilities

• Join a team that’s leading interaction design for our product.
• Take complex ideas and translate them into clean workflows based on user research.
• Facilitate user testing and conduct interface analysis.
• Engage with our customers and product team to understand user needs and competitive landscape.
• Aid in the creation of user stories and support our engineering teams during scrum sprints.
• Create and maintain design guidelines to ensure consistency across our applications.
• Work with design and development teams to bring UX concepts to life.
• Evangelize the importance of design within the organization.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• 2-4 years’ experience working in UX for web-based platforms.
• Experience in user research, interaction design and visual design for the web.
• Strong creative research, writing, and design skills.
• Strong communication skills, but better listening skills.
• You live in Sketch for early concepts, wireframes and high fidelity mockups.
• Adept at creating interactive prototypes with InVision, Marvel, Flinto or similar tools.

Nice to Haves

• Experience with graphic design.
• Ability to write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• Experience with responsive and native mobile app design (iOS, Android).

Education

3-year diploma or 4-year degree in design, computer science, human-computer interaction, or similar.

December 2016: Creating a brew pub experience at Abe Erb

As many of you know, we’ll sometimes host uxWaterloo sessions at a pub where we can enjoy great conversations about UX and related topics in a casual atmosphere. We’ve done this at many locations over the years, but for December we’re doing something special.

Abe Erb is a Waterloo brew pub that we’ve visited in the past, most recently for our UXtoberfest session back in October. Abe Erb is about to open a brand new  location at the historic Tannery building in downtown Kitchener, and anticipation is high within certain circles in the community. Join us for a special private tour of the new space, and hear from co-founder Tony Theodosiou as he shares with us the thinking that goes into creating a delightful brew pub experience, lessons learned along the way, and new things to expect from the new location.

Note the special day and time for this event: Sunday December 18, at 1:00pm in the afternoon!

You can find Abe Erb on Twitter.

Please register for this free event

Sunday December 18, 2016
1:00 to 2:30 pm
Abe Erb (Tannery location)
151 Charles Street West
Kitchener, Ontario

Job: Manager of UX Design at Christie Digital Systems

Join the UX team at Christie in a leadership role and help solve meaningful and complex design challenges with a team of dedicated professionals. Established several years ago at Christie, the UX team has made a significant shift in our culture and in our product lines, shifting us from technology centric to user centric designs. The on-going collaboration with engineering teams in designing new processes and output have helped changed the shape of the professional AV industry, with several high profile wins attributed to the group. This role will offer a high profile chance to work in industrial, visual and interaction design paradigms to create meaningful, enjoyable experiences that are market leading.

In this role, you will assume the primary leadership, scaling up staffing, managing and mentoring staff, providing insight and guidance to the team, establishing work processes and principles, work closely with engineering and product management, organize user research, seek greater market and user insights and help in making the inevitable trade-offs between usability and engineering constraints. You will be one of the primary champions of UX at Christie and will interact with many beyond engineering and product management including sales, customers of all levels and at industry events.

You will have three or more years of leadership experience of a UX team and five to fifteen years of industry experience. A keen understanding and experience in industrial design, visual design and interaction design principles are a must. A passion for product design and the ability to bridge the gap between users and complex tools as well as a desire to understand and analyze market trends and dynamics are key. A strong portfolio of work along with demonstrable leadership qualities will be vital too. A dynamic self-starter with a passion for leading teams to greatness in a UX discipline will define the winning candidate.

To apply, please email Hans Kao at hans.kao@christiedigital.com.

Job: Interaction Designer at Manulife RED Lab

Imagine a place where grown men and women are not afraid to play with Lego. Where practically all surfaces are made as canvases for your ideas (that means you can write on them, yo). Where you — yes, YOU — get to have a say on what cool new shiny toy you want to play with next in order to solve real problems in how financial services (think: banking and insurance and everything in between) is done today. And you get paid to do it.

Welcome to Manulife’s Research, Exploration and Development Lab! But you can call it the RED Lab. We’re a small team with big ideas and we want more idea hackers like you. We are fully funded and supported by Manulife but largely work autonomously like a startup. We aim high, run fast, and jump often. Our playground is the Communitech Hub — the origin of Pebble Watch, Thalmic Labs, Vidyard and more. This is where all cool things related to startups and innovation in Kitchener/Waterloo happen. And that’s where we want to play, too.

About the role

The Interaction Designer will be able to discover, understand, and communicate the organization’s business requirements, the emotional desires of our customers, and the context in which these two come together. Regardless of form-factor or device, the Interaction Designer will make deliberate design decisions backed up by solid reasoning and evidence. We’re looking for someone who is part researcher and part UI designer, who is driven by curiosity, a healthy appetite to learn, and an eagerness to solve people’s problems.

About you

• Are you a creative who is analytic? Or an analytic who is creative?
• Do you believe in and champion the value of user research?
• Do you love designing interfaces that help and delight people?
• Are you excited to influence and convince your peers to look at the world through your
  empathy-tinted worldview?
• Do you get excited by the idea of advocating for the value of design in a large organization?
• Are you comfortable with prototyping and interface-building tools like Keynote, Sketch,
  InVision, Illustrator or any other tools to bring your design ideas to life? Are you always looking
  out for new tools that can make your design process better?
• Do you believe that financial services need to be designed better for human experiences?
• Do you care and wonder about how many more things can be stuffed in a pizza crust?

Then RED Lab wants to talk to you!

How you will contribute

• Participate in and contribute to project kickoff and ideation sessions and help to set the overall design strategy.
• Plan, coordinate, and conduct user requirements analysis, task analysis, conceptual modelling, interaction design, and usability testing.
• Design and specify user interfaces for multiple form factors including smartphones, smartwatches, and even voice, using participatory and iterative design techniques, including observational studies, customer interviews, usability testing, design sprints, rapid prototyping, and other forms of requirements discovery.
• Be comfortable with producing and evangelizing design artifacts like personas, storyboards, scenarios, flowcharts, design prototypes, and design specifications.
• Effectively communicate research findings, conceptual ideas, detailed design, and design rationale both verbally and visually with a strong bend towards storytelling.
• Work closely with RED Lab/Manulife developers to ensure that design specifications are understood and implemented.
• Occasionally mentor and educate co-ops, peers, and senior managers on the design process.

What success looks like

Success in this role means delivering results and excitement through team work and a relentless focus on what’s best for Manulife’s customers and the organization. Success is walking into RED Lab every work day eager to learn about emerging trends in technology and design, and having the drive and curiosity to bring your wildest imaginations to life. Success is embracing uncertainty and being willing to discover as you continue to rapidly prototype your way to knowledge. Success is making it easier for the larger organization to adopt your ideas and enthusiasm for change. Success is believing that you can make a difference.

How to apply

If this posting has resonated with you, then what are you waiting for? Send your cover letter and portfolio of your best works and design process (we really, really would like to see a portfolio), to Ali_Tariq@manulife.com. If we see a potentially good fit, we’ll call you in to get to know each other a little more!

November 2016: UX in the Wild

Recently, KW’s very own Sarah Klassen-Rempel gave this talk at the UX Cambridge conference in the United Kingdom. Please join us as Sarah gives a hometown reprise!

One year ago, my idealistic view of what it would be like to work as a UX designer in the real world was shattered. I went from being surrounded by like-minded people, learning more UX and being able to approach projects my own way, to being the first and only UI/UX designer at a transportation management software company. It meant I needed to learn a lot of things, fast. And the things that I did learn were not things that I thought I would be learning when I started the job.

This talk, at its core, is about those things. The things I needed to learn and implement quickly — in order to go from drawing icons and being called the “UIX designer” to running sessions at a user group conference and visiting customers to talk directly to our users.

On the surface, this talk is about what it’s like to go from being a full-time student to a full-time UX designer — in a place that has never had one before — and the unexpected challenges that came with that experience. But it’s also a reminder that UX isn’t always glamorous, a celebration of how far UX has come as a discipline, and a case study or testimony of how important mentorship can be.

The first time I did a version of this talk was at UX Cambridge this September (that’s Cambridge, England, not Ontario), and I am really excited to have the opportunity to share it with my home community.

Connect with Sarah on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Please register for this free event

Thursday November 17, 2016
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Communitech Hub
Roddenberry Theatre on the 3rd floor
151 Charles Street West
Kitchener, Ontario

Job: UI/UX Designer at Bedouin

If you’re an individual looking to work in an environment that facilitates your obsessive need to perfect details — this is the role for you.

We’re looking for a team player that is familiar with both UX Research and can apply those principles in their own UI/interface designs. This role will primarily be working on our internal projects, and will involve some occasional work on long-standing client projects. You will collaborate with internal Bedouin colleagues to develop and maintain our projects, along with experimenting by building out mini projects and tools for Bedouin in our laboratory.

This role is perfect for someone who cares about the methodical parts of UX, creative pieces of UI, and the ability to drive innovation through growth by design.

You can do this:

• Communicate like a boss
• Familiar with best UX practises and techniques
• Create pixel perfect interface design, while still keeping in mind UX practises
• Enhance designs with fluid, elegant animation and interactivity
• Constantly seek inspiration, and share that inspiration with others
• Stay humble and stay hungry, leaving ego at the door
• Articulate challenges before they become problems
• Work hard, play hard, and love what you do

What we expect:

• Experience with Sketch
• Execute interaction design and visual design as a part of a multi-disciplinary team
• Design elegant solutions to complex workflows
• Consult with clients and lead experience architect
• Research interaction design trend and technology trends
• Create developer-ready wireframes, behavioural specifications and personas
• Develop mobile and web mock-ups and demos
• Have been developing for a while now (over 2 years)

Bonus Points:

If have experience with Principle, we’ll be happy campers.

You get this:

• Money
• Free snacks (who hates fruit roll-ups?!) and frequent company lunches/dinners
• Amazing clients to work with
• A great working space in Downtown Kitchener right next to the Innovation District
• A seasoned team with acquisitions under their belt that work hard, have fun, and love challenges
• Growth opportunities

To apply

Please send your resume and cover letter to hello@bedouin.com. Please include your portfolio, Behance or Dribbble links, and/or samples of your work to be considered for this position.

*Please note: While we sincerely appreciate your interest in Bedouin, due to a high number of applicants, sometimes we can only respond directly to those who best quality and meet the specific criteria and standards of our roles.

October 2016: UXtoberfest is back!

September was a busy month on the UX calendar in Waterloo Region. Fluxible 2016 delivered a full week of events that delivered plenty of insights into practice, products, and the people behind them.

Let’s get together and celebrate Autumn with our second UXtoberfest session. We’ll meet at Abe Erb in Uptown Waterloo and together talk about all of the UX goodness that will fit!

Please register for this free event

Thursday October 20, 2016
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Abe Erb Brewing
15 King Street South, Uptown Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario

Job: Senior Product Designer at D2L

Location: Kitchener, ON
Position: Senior Product Designer
Company: D2L

Are you a motivated Product Designer who is passionate about creating delightful and usable experiences that help users become awesome? Do you like to think big and have a desire to inspire the people around you? Do you want your design work to have a bigger impact? If this sounds like you, then come join our Product Design team as a Product Designer, and help us change the way the world learns!

We are a design team of just over 20 individuals. Our primary roles are Product Designer or User Experience Researcher — but we are much more diverse than our roles suggest. Although most of us have been at D2L longer, our team is just over one year old. In that time we’ve come together in a big way and we’ve made some big splashes together.

We are organized in persona teams: “Learner Experience”, “Teacher Experience” and “Institutional Experience”. Our team personas do not define us — we are one team and work in pairs that transcend these groups – because learning is a two way street between learner and teacher. If you are looking to be a part of a nascent Design Culture — this is the place for you.

We are not looking for unicorns. We don’t want you to code — unless that is how you communicate naturally. We don’t want you to spread yourself thin across too many areas of specialization.

We are looking for someone who wants to share what they know about design and someone who wants to grow as a designer. Someone who wants to focus on designing the right experiences for learners and teachers. Someone willing to fail early and diverge…

“The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away.” — Linus Pauling

If this sounds like you, we want to talk to you. If this sounds to good to be true, it isn’t — the catch is that we expect you to bring your A game — every day.

What we are looking for

• Passion — We want to see your passion for users, for design and for working collaboratively with other talented designers and user researchers.
• Portfolio — You don’t need to have launched products that have changed the world. But, you will need to show us your designs and have a conversation about the business and user problems you are trying to solve.
• Point of view (POV) — We want to hear what you have to say. We are looking for designers who have and can form opinions about their work. You’ll need to be able to talk about your ideas, concepts, research findings and designs in front of others – including senior leadership.

What we offer

• A design team like no other in Kitchener-Waterloo.
• A place for you to learn and grow as a designer and a human being.
• Projects that will make you feel good again about working in tech. It’s not all about eyeballs, advertising and closing VC rounds.
• A chance to change the way the world learns.
• A strong commitment to work/life balance. Because you and your family matter.

Brass tacks

Ok, beyond passion, portfolio and point of view, we are looking for someone with some real design experience — 5+ years worth.

We are looking for someone who is a team player and wants to collaborate with others. You should understand that everyone can be a leader. Being a self starter is a given.

If you have the 5+ years experience, we’re assuming you can work in an agile environment and you understand and practice key concepts including: Lean UX, Design Sprints (Google Ventures version of Design Thinking process) & Story Mapping. This experience is a vital foundation for the work that you’ll do here.

“Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.” —Albert Einstein

Apply online on our website.

September 2016: Fluxible, Canada’s UX Festival

September is a busy month in the UX community here in Waterloo Region. The fifth edition of Fluxible is happening!

Started as a two-day conference back in 2012, for 2016 Fluxible has grown into Canada’s UX Festival, a week-long affair that runs September 19 through 25! The Festival comprises Fluxible Conference, Fluxible Workshops, and Fluxible Meetups, with each providing some fantastic opportunities to learn and to meet UX folks in the community.

We think there’s something for everyone, and rather than create a single uxWaterloo event for September, we’ve decided to  suggest instead that you look at the various Fluxible events and see which ones appeal the most. Go check them out!

August 2016: Informal Pub Meetup, Part 2

Now available in a special August Edition! Complete with this repeated text form our delightful July Edition:

In what is now a beloved summer tradition, it’s time to replace energizing presentations and deep UX thoughts with a lighter event befitting the season. Let’s savour that summer feeling with a July an August uxWaterloo session that features informal talk, some of it even UX-related, and drinks. As befits any self-respecting tradition, we do this every July and August and the laid-back atmosphere and conversations are a welcome addition to any summer schedule. Join us!

And, as has become a yearly tradition, count on hearing from Bob and Mark with an an update on Fluxible 2016, Canada’s UX Festival! You’ve been warned…

Please register for this free event

Thursday August 18, 2016
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Abe Erb Brewing
15 King Street South, Uptown Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario