User Experience Designer

Position Summary:

The User Experience (UX) Designer is responsible for ensuring an effective and consistent user experience at the asset level. Ensure that applications are powerful, engaging, and rewarding by taking a user-centered design approach. Create navigational structures, conceptual frameworks, process flows, wireframes, prototypes, and interaction specifications for digital experiences across a variety of business units and user groups, in collaboration with enterprise partners. Test/evaluate experiences during the design process and optimize experiences over time. Work with cross-functional business and technology teams and key stakeholders in an agile environment to create highly effective and usable digital solutions.

Responsibilities include but not limited to:

Lead asset-level user experience initiatives, including the development of wireframes, mock-ups, prototypes, and other project deliverables to illustrate the intended user experience for functional, marketing, and informational websites, mobile sites, applications, and emails.

• Collaborates with the project team and stakeholders across multiple business lines to understand user needs and objectives, business goals, requirements, and constraints. 
• Produces UX documentation and specifications that meet user needs and business needs, while adhering to technical and legal/regulatory constraints. 
• Assesses the need for user research (personas, journey maps, task analysis, usability testing, etc.) on a particular project and determines the work to be completed. 
• Creates high-quality deliverables that are consistent with best practices and established patterns and guidelines. Deliverables may include navigational structures, process flows, wireframes, prototypes, and interaction specifications. 
• Develops low- or high-fidelity fidelity wireframes and prototypes that align with the design style guide, brand standards, and usability best practices. 
• Leads usability testing, including ongoing usability studies, to obtain direct user feedback and make recommendations for improvement as needed. 
• Analyzes user feedback on the company’s digital properties to identify trends and recommend changes that will improve the user experience.

Serves as the user experience representative in the development of digital assets, balancing user needs and business needs along with project and budget constraints and technical or legal/regulatory requirements.

• Champions the user perspective in the systems development process, and brings a strong interaction design viewpoint. 
• Applies user experience design principles to create innovative, user-centered designs to build and maintain consistent user experience, collaborating with other UX team members as needed. 
• Incorporates user research and usability testing results to improve the user experience. 
• Helps identifies pain points in the user experience and seeks out opportunities to resolve or improve them. 
• Participates in the assessment of potential solutions and analyzes the pros and cons to the user experience. 
• Understands project and systems constraints, and works with the project team to improve the solution within them. 
• Ensures information architecture and interaction designs are compliant with WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines and best practices. 
• Presents design ideas, including rationale based on customer research and best practices, to the product team and stakeholders.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years experience as a UX designer, interaction designer, experience designer, information architect, or similar role working in a user-centered design process. 
• Strong experience with qualitative research methods (interviewing, usability studies, ethnographic observation) 
• Experience with UX design tools (e.g. Sketch, Axure, Adobe XD, etc.). 
• Experience with digital prototyping tools (e.g., InVision, Axure, etc.). 
• Working knowledge of behavioral statistics and the principles of experimental design 
• Ability to articulate complex concepts clearly and concisely, through both written and verbal means. 
• High attention to detail of execution and the ability to work quickly under deadline pressure and remain flexible. 
• Strong organization, prioritization, and project coordination skills to work across multiple initiatives simultaneously. 
• Strong relationship and interpersonal skills to build effective partnerships and lead across functions and business areas. 
• Strong ability to collaborate and assert a point of view positively. 
• Ability to quickly learn and effectively work in a variety of subject matter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Degree in a field such as interactive design, industrial design, graphic design, human factors, or equivalent experience.
• Experience in financial services and understanding of financial services users/customers.

Securian Financial has been around for 140 years. We’re committed to giving back to our community, donating 15,000 employee volunteer hours this past year. We also provide extensive resources to our employees for professional development and growth and a number of diverse professional and social opportunities throughout the company. There’s a reason our employees have voted us as a best place to work year after year! In addition:

• Generous paid time off. We want you to take time off for whatever matters most to you! 
• Tuition reimbursement program. We value continuous learning at Securian! 
• Company-funded pension plan as well as 401K retirement plan – great resources to secure your financial future. 
• Continuous opportunities for new challenges. 
• Variety of health plan options as well as dental and vision plans. 
• Paid maternity/paternity leaves.