Job: UX Designer at Igloo Software

Location: Kitchener, Ontario

Igloo is an intranet you’ll actually like. It’s a web-based solution that enables you to share files, give updates, find answers, exchange ideas and work better together with your colleagues and customers.

We are looking for a senior UX Designer who fights for the user. You are passionate about personas, story boards, wireframes, and occasionally the back of a napkin. You understand that design and performance are not mutually exclusive and you know how to blend the two.

You will take ownership of the style guide and best practices that drive our designs, as well as enhancing them and driving their widespread implementation. You will ensure new features fit into the platform according to the standardized methodology and will tune existing features to be more coherent. You will question designs, prototypes and demos to ensure they live up to a high standard.

You’ll have multiple projects in various stages at any given time and you should be comfortable with switching tasks as priorities change.

You don’t have to know how to code, but you should understand the impact designs have on technical performance.

Key responsibilities:

• Conduct research to understand user needs and competitive landscape
• Collect and document business and functional requirements
• Translate complex ideas into clean user interface concepts
• Create user flows, wireframes, and other pieces of UX documentation
• Work with design and development teams to bring UX concepts to life
• Facilitate user testing and conduct interface analysis
• Provide ideas to “make it better”

Need to have:

• 3-year diploma or 4-year degree in design, computer science, or similar
• 2-4 years experience working in UX for web-based platforms
• Experience in user interface design or design for the web
• Strong creative research, writing, and design skills
• Strong attention to detail

Nice to have:

• Ability to write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• Experience with responsive design

How to apply:

Send your cover letter and resume (as one document), as well as portfolio (URL or PDF) to careers@igloosoftware.com.

Job: User Experience Designer at Dematic

Location: Waterloo, Ontario

Dematic is a global engineering company that provides a comprehensive range of intelligent warehouse logistics and materials handling solutions. With a global knowledge network of more than 4,000 skilled logistics professionals, Dematic is able to provide customers with a unique perspective in world-class materials handling solution design. Our commitment to solution development, combined with engineering centers and manufacturing plants in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, ensures Dematic has the range and capability to provide reliable, flexible, cost-effective solutions globally. Our successful track record has led to the development and implementation of more than 5,000 integrated systems for a customer base that includes small, medium, and large companies doing business in a variety of market sectors. Dematic generates a global business volume of approximately $1.3 billion.

The Global R&D Software Organization is responsible for delivering software products to support a wide range of conveyor and sortation solutions, warehouse automation, and distribution operations.

This is an exciting opportunity to join our software team in Waterloo, Ontario, and to establish a user-centered design approach for the Global Software organization. We are building an Analytics platform to help Dematic global customers optimize the performance and throughput of their warehouse and distribution systems. You will have hands-on responsibility for designing the user interface to provide rich data visualization, reporting, and data mining.

You must have a passion for championing the user through the development process, coming up with innovative ideas, and working collaboratively with other talented people to put those ideas into products.

Key Responsibilities

• Act as a user advocate throughout the software development process
• Develop intuitive screens allowing the user to visualize and understand complex data
• Work directly with customers and other stakeholders to understand user needs
• Help build a product that lets customers visualize and understand complex data and make decisions
• Create consistently high quality user interface mockups and walkthroughs for stakeholder reviews
• Perform usability testing and take a data-driven approach to optimizing user experience
• Work within a Scrum environment to plan and deliver incremental software in defined sprints
• Establish overall UI style guide for software, aligned with marketing and other stakeholders
• Develop a library of icons and other UI assets for global software products
• Build strong partnerships with software developers, business analysts and product managers
• Travel to other Dematic sites with some frequency (particularly in the first six months)

Qualifications

• Post-secondary education in human-computer interaction, design or related field
• Minimum of 3-4 years’ experience working on web-based product design
• Experience using standard wire framing, prototyping and design tools
• Knowledge of front-end web development including JavaScript, HTML and CSS
• Understanding of customer analytics and principles of data visualization and dashboards
• Strong analytical and problem solving skills with a high attention to detail
• Proven ability to work directly with customers to understand requirements and elicit feedback
• Ability to design and facilitate interviews, usability tests, and other research activities
• Exceptional ability to work with cross-functional teams to build partnerships and get things done
• A strong portfolio of mobile and web work for real products
• Experience working in an Agile Scrum environment to evolve product design over many iterations
• Knowledge of HTML/CSS is an asset
• A good sense of humor and an ability to have fun!

APPLY ONLINE

Startup Weekend wants YOU!

Got any plans for the first weekend of February? Yes? Well, cancel them. Because you’re starting a company instead.

This year’s edition of Startup Weekend happens at the Communitech Hub on February 6-8, and UX designers are a hot commodity. Anyone is welcome to pitch a startup idea, then teams organically form to turn the top ideas into reality. It’s a 54 hour frenzy of business model creation, coding, designing, and market validation. And it’s loads of fun.

Check out the details and get registered.

Job: UI/UX Designer at Canon Innovation Lab

Location: Waterloo, Ontario

Who are we?

Canon is the leader in digital imaging. Since 1973 Canon Canada has demonstrated a commitment to enhancing our contribution to society through technological innovation and excellence and we’re proud and excited to be recruiting a brand new team to push us to forward towards these goals.

Launched in November, Canon’s new Innovation Lab @ Communitech is a focal point of innovation within the entire global Canon organization. We are building a brand new team, in a newly renovated space, along side organizations like Google, BlackBerry, Christie Digital, Manulife, TD Canada Trust, and Canadian Tire.

We are currently seeking a Full-Time UI/UX Designer to design brand new prototypes based on ideas generated within the innovation team or in response to business problems outlined by the company.

What will you be responsible for?

• Working with the internal team, company stakeholders, and partners to understand, refine and develop their idea
• Defining user personas and documenting user workflows
• Creating wireframe interfaces for multiple platforms

What traits do you need to be successful?

• Curiosity. You must enjoy learning new tools, technologies and concepts.
• Self-Reliance. An ability to learn, work, investigate and solve problems, all with minimal
  guidance is vital.
• Platform agnosticism. We develop web-based and native mobile applications using the
  appropriate tool for each project.
• Flexibility. This is an experiment. We don’t have all the answers, and need your help to figure it out!

What skills would be an asset?

• Experience with Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch and Adobe Creative Suite/In Design
• Comfortable with an iterative design process, sweat the details and enjoy working through
  numerous options before committing to one
• Familiarity with front-end programming. You should know which parts of your design require
  HTML, CSS, or JavaScript (being able to code is a asset, but not a requirement)
• The ability to interact with almost anyone, and to guide their thoughts into meaningful decisions about the nature of their ideas and products
• An understanding of the business drivers that influence a product’s life cycle
• Extensive portfolio highlighting thoughtful and creative design

If you are interested in joining Canon in our new innovation lab, please submit your resume and cover letter to the opportunity below. Please submit links to portfolios or samples of application work if available. Canon is committed to employment equity and is an equal opportunity employer. A criminal check will be completed for the successful candidate.

To apply, send directly to Matt Scobel at mscobel@canada.canon.com

December 2014: Designing for Disruptive Innovation

Our very own Robert Barlow-Busch, co-champion of uxWaterloo, spoke last month by invitation of Jared Spool at UX Thursday in Toronto. If you missed that event, here’s your chance to catch Bob’s talk, which people described as informative, inspiring, and entertaining. Join us and find out if it’s true!

Sometimes we get so focused on winning the small victories of the present — like sign-off on UX or design support — that we fail to plan for a project’s bigger challenges.

Robert Barlow-Busch journeyed with a team who faced the possibility of failure after ignoring something big: the future. In this talk, Robert will share how:

• Having higher-ups support design and research can impact a project
• Bringing colleagues along for a design journey will turn them into evangelists
• Destroying a team’s assumptions might be a designer’s most important contribution

About the speaker

Robert has spent over 20 years as an interaction designer with one foot in the marketing world. He’s now leading the charge in both worlds as Chief Experience Officer of MetaMarketplace. He’s busy building Ontario’s design community as co-chair of the Fluxible conference and co-champion of uxWaterloo.

You can find Robert’s ideas in books such as User-Centered Design Stories and The Persona Lifecycle.

Please register at Meetup.com for this free event

Remember, we’re now using Meetup.com to manage our monthly sessions. Join us there!

Monday December 15, 2014
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Boltmade Inc.
187 King St North
2nd Floor
Waterloo, ON
N2J 1R1

[View on Google Maps]

Job: Head of User Experience

Company: In stealth
Location: Waterloo, Ontario

We are looking for a talented, creative and experienced design leader to take on the role of Head of User Experience. This person will lead the design of every customer touch point and experience, from business cards to an application sub-menu, and everywhere in between. Collaborating with the rest of the management team, the Head of User Experience will have the opportunity to create the kind of technology experiences that people will remember and recall often.

Don’t get it twisted though — this is a big job. Our company cannot succeed without the right person in this role.

Responsibilities

Lead all creative aspects of the company, be the voice of the customer, strive religiously to deliver the best product experiences, know when to lead and when to get out of the way. We’re even holding off on naming the company to enable the Head of User Experience to be part of the conversation.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s, Master’s in Visual Arts, equivalent program, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years experience in interface, visual and user experience design.
• 5+ years experience in heuristic analysis, accessibility and usability testing.
• Design experience with user-facing experiences on Internet connected devices (desktop, web, mobile, other).
• Design experience with shipping products used by real people in the real world.
• 5+ years experience in leading teams and people.
• Extreme passion to deliver the best product experience humanly possible.
• Demonstrable history of innovation.
• Self-starter who can roll well with others, deliver now, and be flexible in a fast-paced startup environment.
• Work in Waterloo (co-located work environment).
• Excellent written and oral communication skills.

Apply now

Send your resume and portfolio to gfeezee at gmail dot com.

Job: Director of User Experience at Sun Life

Location: Waterloo or Toronto, Ontario

Summary

Reporting to the AVP, Digital Strategy, the Director, User Experience is a new role. The Director, User Experience and team will provide thought leadership and be the resident authority team on user experience and information architecture principles.

This person will have a demonstrated ability to collaborate effectively with a variety of business leaders, technology leaders, brand teams, and other key stakeholders to develop large growth businesses.

The ideal candidate will bring deep understanding of customer research, knowledge gathering, ideation, prototyping, design frameworks and concept visualization. He or she will bring years of experience building and leading a team ideally including user experience leads, architects and researchers. The Director, User Experience will partner and work with the business units and regions to ensure alignment incorporating feedback and best practices. This role will interface and have accountabilities for communication with a variety of stakeholders in Canada, the US and Asia.

Accountabilities

• Develop and implement an enterprise level strategy for embedding user experience (UX) guidelines and best practices in the organization.
• Provide strategic guidance in support of the user experience and information architecture service by understanding the direction and goals of the business.
• Identify and champion the User Experience to deliver business value and increase the Sun Life Financial digital brand recognition
• Identify innovation opportunities improving the customer experience and lead generation with a focus on creating and updating the digital properties to address user challenges.
• Define and incorporate relevant UX, web and mobile usage research and date to appropriately inform design decisions
• Create and effectively present UX deliverables; wireframes, workflows and paper prototypes to explain and negotiate design solutions to key stakeholder.
• Define and measure metrics to track user satisfaction both overall and specific to strategic development
• Build and maintain key relationships in Canadian, US and Asia with Marketing leaders by optimizing their digital channels and ensuring a customer-centric approach is consistent with the Digital Marketing vision and mandate.
• Keep abreast of industry trends, web development technology and advancements insuring SLF provides best in class services
• Staff and train the team according to strategic direction and technical requirements
• Foster and promote a positive working and leaning environment

Skills

• Strong knowledge of user experience design; information architecture and interaction design. Leading expert and thought leader in UX methodology.
• Familiar with User Centered Design Process.
• Ability to successfully manage and deliver on multiple projects.

Education and Experience

• University or advance degree in business, marketing or communications
• Minimum 7 years’ experience in digital environment
• Experience with developing and executing UX strategy in a mid to large size corporation
• Business minded and oriented
• Excellent communication skills – written and verbal
• Strong interpersonal skills and ability to develop relationships to influence change
• Innovative problem solving skills and excellent analytical abilities
• Strong ability to identify and implement process improvements

To apply

Please apply for this position by email at ashley.avolio [at] sunlife [dot] com. We thank all applicants for showing an interest in this position. Only those selected for an interview will be contacted.

October 2013: The state of UX in Waterloo Region

Thursday October 17, 2013
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Communitech Hub, P2P Room
151 Charles St. W.
Kitchener, ON N2G 1H6

There’s no denying it: Kitchener-Waterloo is a happening, hopping place to be these days. We’re known as one of North America’s hotspots for technology startups. And despite some big questions about our anchor company (we’re still rooting for you, Blackberry!), new and exciting businesses are choosing Waterloo region as home. In the last 2 weeks alone, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced that Square is opening an office, and Google has decided to expand its presence by setting up a Motorola Mobility office.

With all this activity, we’re seeing a heightened interest in and demand for user experience design. Join us for a lively discussion about the state of UX in Waterloo region. If you’re new to the area, it’ll be a good introduction to the scene; if you’re an old-timer, come prepared to share some of your insights and war stories. We’ll cover such questions as:

• What local companies are interested in UX?
• Which of them have UX people/teams on staff?
• What kind of work is being done by local UX’ers?
• How has UX changed in our region over the last 10 years?
• How do we see our landscape evolving in the near future?
• What could we do to strengthen our local UX community?

Bring your questions and your own experiences. We look forward to a great discussion!

StartupWeekend KW looking for UX mentors

Startup Weekend returns to KW on September 20-22, 2013 at the Communitech Hub. If you missed it last year, here’s your chance to get involved with a fun weekend-long, hands-on experience in which new startup ideas take form and come to life.

Communitech is looking for some UXers to participate as mentors during the event. Lend your expertise to the participating teams, make new friends and connections, and help create something awesome. Mentoring doesn’t necessarily require a commitment of the entire weekend. For more information or to express your interest, please email KW (at) startupweekend (dot) org.

About Startup Weekend

Startup Weekend is a global grassroots movement of active and empowered entrepreneurs who are learning the basics of founding startups and launching successful ventures. It is the largest community of passionate entrepreneurs with over 400 past events in 100 countries around the world in 2011.

The non-profit organization is headquartered in Seattle, Washington but Startup Weekend organizers and facilitators can be found in over 200 cities around the world. From Mongolia to South Africa to London to Brazil, people around the globe are coming together for weekend-long workshops to pitch ideas, form teams, and start companies.

All Startup Weekend events follow the same basic model: anyone is welcome to pitch their startup idea and receive feedback from their peers. Teams organically form around the top ideas (as determined by popular vote) and then it’s a 54 hour frenzy of business model creation, coding, designing, and market validation. The weekends culminate with presentations in front of local entrepreneurial leaders with another opportunity for critical feedback.

Whether entrepreneurs found companies, find a cofounder, meet someone new, or learn a skill far outside their usual 9-to-5, everyone is guaranteed to leave the event better prepared to navigate the chaotic but fun world of startups. If you want to put yourself in the shoes of an entrepreneur, register now for the best weekend of your life!

Job: Interaction Designer at Google

Location: Google in Waterloo, Ontario
Team or role: User Experience & Design

The mantra of the the User Interface (UI) team is: “Focus on the user and all else will follow.” As a UI Designer, you have a strong technical background and work closely with Engineers and Product Managers to design products that are simple but great for the user, focusing on interaction and visual design. Using your keen design aesthetic you design and conduct experiments with real users so that improvements to the user experience are based on real user behavior. Your job is to make sure that our products are intuitive, accessible and usable to our millions of users.

You design and lead the UI construction for complex projects with a broad scope and evolving objectives. You contribute to the overall product strategy through concept generation, prototyping and collaboration with with UX team to promote feature integration, as well as working with researchers to design user experiments to test your designs.

Please include URLs for an online portfolio in addition to resume. Submissions without a portfolio included will not be considered.

Responsibilities

• Help to define the user model and user interface for new and existing Google products and features.
• Develop high level and/or detailed storyboards, mockups, and prototypes to effectively communicate interaction and design ideas.

Minimum qualifications

• BA/BS degree in Design (e.g. interaction, graphic, visual communications, product, industrial), HCI, CS, or a related field (in lieu of degree, 5 years relevant work experience).
• 2 years relevant work experience.

Preferred qualifications

• 3 years experience designing outstanding web-based products for a consumer-oriented website.
• Excellent CSS and HTML skills; solid knowledge of Adobe Photoshop and/or Fireworks.
• Proven ability to act as a leader in communicating conceptual ideas and design rationale, all within a user-centered design process.
• Must be self-motivated to prioritize and manage workload and meet critical project milestones and deadlines.
• Excellent interpersonal skills with the ability to build good working relationships and excellent problem-solving skills.

Area

Users come first at Google. Nowhere is this more important than on our Advertising team: we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what our users wish to find. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content. We build and maintain the platforms that have made Google what it is today, and are constantly innovating to deliver the most effective advertising opportunities of tomorrow.

Apply for this job at Google.