Job: Senior UX Architect at Sun Life

Company: SunLife
Position: Senior UX Architect – MAR01998
Location: Waterloo, Ontario

Sun Life Financial is seeking a leader with significant UX/UI experience to join our Digital User Experience team within Canadian Operations. You will be responsible for guiding and creating remarkable and progressive digital experiences for a variety of audiences to support our business in Canada. You will work closely with stakeholders in multiple business units to define the user experience for Sun Life Financial secure digital properties, ensuring they closely align with the client’s key success factors. You will work collaboratively with fellow members of the team to conceptualize design and prototype ideas for implementation on the web, mobile and social channels.

You as a UX Architect you will:

• Provide insightful high-level UX thought leadership and consulting in on various projects yet also have the ability to seamlessly shift to delivering detailed project designs and documentation required
• Determine the need for user research and user testing and orchestrate and oversee the process. Interpret and review research findings for presentations to project teams
• Lead the design of user interface related features and participate in developing progressive solutions for the public facing web, mobile and social channels. Apply sound interaction design principles to influence project strategy and direction
• Projects manage user experience deliverables produced by internal and 3rd party resources as required to ensure expectations are successfully met
• Be an evangelist for user experience practices across the company
• Be our in-house expert on web accessibility issues and ensure compliance with evolving accessibility standards
• As part of the UX Centre of Excellence, develop and maintain enterprise standard documents such as; user scenarios, personas, user flows, design mockups, wire-frames, prototypes, specifications, navigation maps, UI standards documents and other design documents
• Ensure standards and best practices are appropriately communicated and documented in Style Guides and other related UX Centre of Excellence assets
• Work to make sure that the workflow reflects the user’s needs and ensure consistency among features
• Define compelling and innovative user interfaces and interaction styles which result in improved user productivity for computer-based web and mobile interfaces
• Share user-centric design best practices through education and informal sessions across the organization.

Qualifications:

• Minimum of 5 years of experience in design / user experience
• University degree or certification in User Experience related field or equivalent work experience
• Portfolio demonstrating impactful customer experiences, including experience developing digital products from initial concept through to implementation
• Design experience ranging across web, mobile (mobile web and native applications) and social channels
• Strong knowledge and experience designing wireframes and interactive prototypes using industry software (e.g. Axure, Balsamiq)
• Well versed in current accessibility standards
• Proven track record and a passion for designing compelling, award-winning user interfaces
• Excellent design, verbal, writing and presentation skills
• Experience working with clients and various departments within a team environment
• Proficiency in HTML5 and CSS
• Knowledge of current web standards and the latest trends
• Ability to successfully manage and deliver on multiple projects

Note: depending on the specific resource hired for this role, more emphasis may be placed on specific responsibilities listed above.

Persons with disabilities who need accommodation in the application process, or those needing job postings in an alternative format, may e-mail a request to thebrightside@sunlife.com

*LI-CA1

We thank all applicants for showing an interest in this position. Only those selected for an interview will be contacted.

Apply online!

Job: UX Developer at LBMX

Location: London, Ontario

Are you half designer half developer? Do you love to create beautiful and user friendly experiences, then help turn them into a reality? Then you’re the candidate for us.

We (LBMX Inc.) are looking for an individual that can help guide the look, feel and user experience of our line of business applications as an engaged member of our software development team.

The Must Have Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science, Interaction Design, Information Systems or related discipline.
• 2 or more years of experience in UX design and development.
• Proven ability to coach others on design and development techniques.
• History of designing and building excellent User Experiences.
• Solid understanding of Web Application design principles and what makes a good UX.
• Experience presenting data in a clear and workable fashion to users from a back end services.

The Must Have Technical Qualifications

• Experience programming with an emphasis on developing for the web.
• Expertise utilizing a graphic suite like Adobe Creative Suite.
• Mastery of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and 3rd part JavaScript libraries and frameworks.
• Knowledge of how to properly utilize LESS or SASS.
• Experience with UX testing.

The Nice To Have Qualifications

• Familiarity working with Microsoft Tools and Languages.
• Working knowledge of SQL Server and NoSQL packages.
• Knowledge of MVC and MVVM patterns.
• Familiarity with Telerik Controls.
• Knowledge of software development best practices.
• Previous experience as a member of an agile software development team.

How to apply

E-mail a resume and cover letter with salary expectations to jlediet@lbmx.com. The subject line of your e-mail must read “Job Application – UX Developer”.

Jobs: Design Positions at BlackBerry

The lovely people over at BlackBerry are looking for a variety of UX Designers, Graphic Designers, and Motion Designers in Waterloo, Ottawa, or Toronto. Check out a sampling of the postings below.

There are a total of 13 jobs posted for design at BlackBerry!

• Visual Lead
• Senior Interaction Design
• Senior Visual Design
• Interaction Designer
• Motion Graphic Designer

Follow the links for details on the positions and how to apply.

Job: Visual Designer at D2L

Company: D2L
Location: Kitchener, Ontario or Winnipeg, Manitoba

What would I be doing in this role at D2L?

• You will be helping learners achieve their full potential. Think about the good you will do for the world!
• You will be researching, designing and influencing products that are going to have an impact on improving teaching and learning.
• You will make the products more usable and beautiful. You will work with layout, typography, color, and motion to guide users through the product and evoke an emotional response. You will push creative boundaries. You care about every pixel.
• You will work with an agile scrum team delivering mobile and web-based solutions that benefit learners, teachers, and those who support them.
• You will collaborate with our team of product designers—experts in visual design, interaction design, user research, accessibility, and front-end development. You will have an opportunity to share your expertise and be supported by other like-minded people. You will continually learn and look for ways to innovate.

What would my main duties be?

• Demonstrate a passion for our users. Participate in a variety of research activities to understand our users’ motivations, behaviours and unmet needs. Validate design ideas and respond to user feedback
• Iteratively design and specify the visuals for key parts of our mobile and web apps
• Rapidly prototype designs so that they can be demonstrated and tested
• Refine the composition and layout of key screens
• Create the detailed visuals elements and subtle animations that make our apps beautiful
• Be a champion for the brand within product development

What is D2L looking for from me?

Visual designers at D2L demonstrate excellence in:

• Layout
• Colour
• Typography
• Illustration
• Motion Graphics and Animation
• Adobe Creative Cloud
• HTML, CSS, JavaScript
• Mobile App Design

In addition, we like to see:

• A track record of delivering successful mobile and web application
• Experience working in an agile development team
• Good understanding of mobile and web technologies and an appetite for learning more
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills
• Degree in graphic design, digital media design, or related discipline

Ready to make a difference?

Contact Pete if you’d like to chat about the role – peter dot rothe at d2l dot com. Otherwise, apply online now.

Reference #: D2LVDWIN

Job: Product Designer at D2L

Company: D2L
Location: Kitchener, Ontario

What would I be doing in this role at D2L?

Whether you are an experienced interaction designer or a recent co-op graduate, we are looking for creative problem solvers to transform product requirements into highly functional user interfaces.

You will be designing and influencing products that are going to have an impact on improving teaching and learning. You have a good intuition for what makes an effective experience and a love for designing software to meet our clients’ goals and expectations.

You will collaborate with your team, usability specialists and other designers who will challenge you to create the most desirable software. Whether you are designing a web or mobile application, our designers are technically savvy and stay on top of the leading technologies they are designing for.

You will continually learn and look for ways to innovate. You thrive in an Agile development environment and culture where designers speak freely and collaborate to solve interesting problems. You take pride not just getting things done, but delivering the best.

What would my main duties be?

• Take product requirements and consolidate them into software workflows that meet user expectations
• Develop user stories, wireframes and high and low-fidelity prototypes to communicate a compelling design vision
• Collaborate with your development team, product owner and graphic designers to ensure feasibility of design concepts
• Conduct user research and focus groups by interacting with the community and internal stakeholders
• Proactively vet designs to ensure seamless user experience across the product suite

What is D2L looking for from me?

• Strong analytical, communication, facilitation, negotiation and interpersonal skills
• Experience taking a design from concept to software delivery
• Experience creating storyboards, wireframes, flow diagrams and interactive prototypes
• Strong visual design sense
• Understanding of Agile and other project methodologies
• Knowledge of user-experience design principles
• Graphic design skills are considered an asset
• Knowledge of accessibility principles is considered an asset

Ready to make a difference?

Contact Pete if you’d like to chat about the role – peter dot rothe at d2l dot com. Otherwise, apply online now.

Reference #: D2LCPD

Job: User Experience Designer at Sandvine

Company: Sandvine
Location: Waterloo, Ontario
Type: Full time

As a User Experience Designer you will be responsible for helping define the user experience for the next generation of Sandvine products.

You will be required to perform a broad range of UX activities, as needed to support various initiatives. Depending on the project this may involve the analysis of existing products, the design and/or redesign of our product user interfaces, planning and execution of field research and usability testing, as well as helping establish standards and guidelines. Additionally, you will collaborate with other team members in a challenging and fast-paced environment.

This position is Waterloo, Ontario.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a knowledgeable and passionate user advocate.
• Analyze products and proactively identify opportunities for improvements in the experience.
• Design intuitive, efficient and elegant experiences for our end users.
• Communicate design ideas and decisions effectively, ensuring that UX design has a strong voice.
• Plan and execute user research and usability tests.
• Establish standards and guidelines.
• Maintain awareness of current human-computer interaction and usability research, theories and methodologies.
• Collaborate with other contributors, including product management, engineering and the support and testing teams.

Qualifications

• Formal education in design, information science, psychology, social science, or equivalent work experience.
• *Deep* understanding of usability and user experience design principles, with a minimum of 5 years of experience.
• Minimum of 5 years of experience organizing and executing field studies and/or usability tests.

• Ability to produce various design artifacts as needed to support your activities: wireframes, mock-ups, task flow models, information maps, personas/user profiles, and/or prototypes. You are a proficient user of various wireframe, drawing or prototyping applications such as Axure, Fireworks, Photoshop, etc., or HTML, CSS & JavaScript.
• Capable of designing user experiences for various devices including desktop, tablet and mobile.
• Exposure to business or technical applications, intellectually curious, and able to learn about products that deal with complex subject matter.
• Awareness of web technology, and its capabilities and constraints.

As a person you are

• An articulate communicator, with excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Flexible and versatile, with the ability to jump into a broad range of UX activities.
• Self-motivated, able to balance the demands of multiple projects, and still get things done.

Apply for this position!

Job: Information Architect at Kobo

Company: Kobo
Location: Toronto, Ontario

Work downtown at one of Canada’s most exciting tech companies and design software architecture for our top-rated Device portfolio.

At Kobo, Information Architects design user interfaces, inform functional specifications, perform competitive reviews and create flows, wireframes and process maps. You must be able to visualize concepts quickly and clearly.

Ideally, you will have at least 5-7 years of experience, a portfolio of successful projects, be extremely proficient in site-mapping and wire-framing software, and possess a keen eye for detail. You will also require significant experience developing mobile applications. The successful applicant will have experience developing applications for mobile devices, tablets and the web.

Information Architects work closely with the Product Owners and Team Leads to determine scope and prioritize feature sets, with the development team to ensure their designs are implemented as intended, and the Usability team to ensure designs and implementations are user friendly.

You should have excellent verbal communications skills and be able to rationalize your designs. You welcome feedback and see collaboration as a natural part of the creative process.

Key Responsibilities

• Conceive, design and prototype useful, usable, and compelling user experiences and user interfaces for mobile applications (represented by scenarios, paper prototypes, storyboards, wireframes, site maps, screen flows, etc.).
• Document user interface requirements
• Apply domain knowledge, user interface design best practices, and knowledge of emerging UX related presentation/gestural technologies.
• Bring strong design, conceptual and problem-solving skills to translate conceptual ideas (business needs and user goals) into simple yet meaningful user interfaces.
• Have a keen understanding of (and interest in) visual design, and enjoy working with graphic designers.
• Assess data from multiple sources (product requirements, tech constraints, UX research, web analytics) and synthesize it in order to develop efficient user scenarios, taxonomies, classification schemes, navigation systems, design patterns, etc.
• Create and effectively present UX deliverables (wireframes, workflows, paper prototypes, etc.) to explain and negotiate design solutions to key stakeholders.
• Help define, request and incorporate relevant and recent UX research and data from customer feedback to appropriately inform design decisions.
• Help define UX performance metrics
• Uphold UX guiding principles and style in project execution.
• Create, maintain and share project documentation and UX guidelines after project execution.
• Develop competitive assessments and perform site/application/device reviews.

Required Skills

• Applicants should have 5-7 years interaction design experience in a product development context
• Must have experience in developing mobile applications
• Is up-to-date on User Interface Guidelines for small and large devices, and knowledgeable about best practices for touch screen devices
• Embrace and champion a collaborative approach in resolving difficult design questions and issues
• Ability to successfully execute multiple projects and tasks simultaneously
• Ability to quickly visualize concepts through sketching or other rapid prototyping methods (experience with Axure a plus)
• Ability to help define site strategies, concepts, content and features
• Experience developing user personas, functional specifications and wireframes
• Understanding of HTML, DHTML, and JavaScript and the capabilities of web browsers, mobile applications and user interactions
• Strong time management skills, is self-motivated, organized and accountable

Apply now!

Job: Interactive Designer at Kobo

Company: Kobo
Location: Toronto, Ontario

Conceive, design and support the implementation of projects with a focus on the visual appearance and interaction design of products, applications and web initiatives.

The range of responsibility in this role requires working closely with members of the UX team, developers, QA and product managers to initiate new features and deliver on approved design requests.

Key Responsibilities

• Produce high-fidelity creative with multiple options for feedback.
• Responsible for creating user interface designs, graphics, icons, colour schemes, layouts and some wireframes.
• Ensure consistency and brand attributes are represented consistently across multiple software applications and experiences.
• Apply domain knowledge, user interface design best practices, and knowledge of emerging UX standards.
• Work closely with other members of the UX team to solve problems and offer multiple options and alternatives to interface and interaction challenges.
• Support the development and quality assurance teams to help optimize the user experience iteratively in an agile development and design environment.
• Share and communicate designs with team members for feedback, implementation limitation considerations and assist in creating stories for sprint planning.
• Monitor and review the execution of the designs through the development cycle.
• Process and deliver graphical assets for developers as required for implementation.
• Create and share detailed layout specifications of final mocks.
• Flash device(s) with the latest build to ensure accurate implementation compared against final designs.
• Attend daily scrums to share information.
• Explore examples of other product designs for inspiration, animations, gestures, layouts, and interaction for future reference.
• Keep up to date on design trends to ensure our designs are current and relevant to the business.
• Strive for and support the creation of highly usable software experiences
• Support usability team members with information required for testing.
• Observe usability testing for design iteration considerations and offer feedback as needed.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Proficiency in industry standard software programs: Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator specifically) in a Mac environment.
• Experience designing mobile applications and websites; in particular designing for small and large devices with knowledge about best practices for touch screen devices.
• The ability to multi-task across multiple projects simultaneously.
• Problem-solving skills and the ability to translate conceptual ideas into high-fidelity creative.

Apply now!

Job: User Experience Designer at Clearpath Robotics

Position: User Experience Designer
Company: Clearpath Robotics
Location: Kitchener, Ontario
Experience: 3 + Years
Education: Undergraduate degree or college diploma in CS, Software Engineering, Graphics Design, Visual Arts, Industrial Design with coursework in HCI and/or user-centered design methods (or equivalent experience)
Duration: Full-Time

About Us

Clearpath Robotics Inc. specializes in the design and manufacture of unmanned vehicle systems for research and development and a variety of commercial applications. Our clients range from small local businesses to some of the best known technical institutions on the planet. Based in Kitchener, Clearpath Robotics employs highly talented people who live and breathe robotics. We believe that work must have a high ìcoolî factor, and weíre looking for people who share in our passion to create remarkable products and change the world.

About the Job

Clearpath has been developing software to make our robots smarter and better able to solve real-world problems– the capabilities of our robots are reaching the point where we risk overwhelming our users. We need someone who loves the idea of having their work affect the real world in very dramatic ways to take on defining the look and feel of usersí interaction with our systems.

As our first User Experience Designer, you will be responsible for putting yourself in the shoes of our users and making sure that our systems are as easy to use as possible. You will also help our robots integrate seamlessly with how the world has been traditionally doing business so far, including when robots get lost or damaged. On top of this, the novelty of some of our systems means that you will have opportunities to develop new ways for users to interact with technology in general.

Your primary responsibilities will be:

• Designing the user experience for robots, from user stories to sketches
• Developing design prototypes in a variety of fidelities
• Conducting user testing and focus groups
• Evaluating possible technical frameworks for implementation of your ideas
• Ensuring that the company brands and product values are clearly expressed
• Emotional support of lost or confused robots

About You

You want to work for a fast-paced growing company that thinks big and dreams huge. You are driven, view work as more than just a job, and are never satisfied with less than 100% effort. You want to be surrounded by people like you; creative, fun-loving, and passionate about their work. You are motivated by making an impact on your workplace and you thrive on challenging and rewarding problems. You aren’t afraid of field testing the results of your work in a blizzard, demonstrating it to a Fortune 500 boardroom, or working with the fact that sometimes, robots just aren’t smart enough for what youíd like them to do (yet).

Required Experience/Skills:

• 3+ years professional experience with user experience design
• 1+ years professional experience with accessibility and usability testing
• Has shipped products used by real people and refined designs after shipping
• Excellent visual communication skills
• Capable of independently developing basic UI prototypes
• Ability to communicate designs with Adobe CS, OmniGraffle, or similar programs
• Work portfolio available for review

Bonus points for:

• Experience with user-facing web technologies
• Experience with Android UI development
• Familiarity with maps and other ways of graphically expressing spatial relationships
• Experience with designing interfaces for commercial/enterprise users
• Familiarity with the QT framework
• Comfort with one or more of: Linux, JIRA, git, ROS
• A firm belief that the only thing holding the robot revolution back is a better UI for Skynet

Apply through our online job portal. Please submit cover letter along with your resume. Instructions for sending supporting documentation, testimonials, references, pictures, web links, code samples, drawings, or other indications of how much you love robots will be provided in the confirmation email sent by our system upon receiving your application. Include User Experience Designer in the subject of any further communications.

No recruiters or form cover letters, please. They do not please our mechanical masters.

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.