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.