Lead UX Designer & Strategist (part time)

SeamlessAccessLead UX Designer & Strategist – estimated .25 FTE for 6-12 months; Location: remote

SeamlessAccess seeks a strategically minded senior UX practitioner familiar with UX research and design activities to continue the evolution and adoption of SeamlessAccess services among a range of groups and organizations that support the research and education community. SeamlessAccess is actively collaborating with service providers who are implementing the service’s persistence service and/or central identity provider discovery service in a Beta Phase. The UX designer is expected to take a lead role providing design guidance and consulting with the UX teams of implementing organizations, as well as plan and help execute ongoing validation of existing and evolving design recommendations, including usability testing, user research, and analytics.

Success in this role will require close collaboration with the small development team and a diverse set of stakeholders from multiple organizations.

Main tasks:

• Advocate and articulate the SeamlessAccess design principles, patterns, and recommendations to product teams at implementing organizations.
• Understand implementers’ use cases and design constraints and make appropriate design recommendations that will work across a broad-spectrum of implementation use-cases.
• Facilitate workshops, design reviews, and other collaborative working experiences.
• Define appropriate methods to validate the value and usability of design solutions.
• Serve as the advocate for the end user by performing user research, conducting user task analysis, developing use cases, and communicating user needs to stakeholders.
• Update and maintain UX guidelines documentation (see Seamlessaccess.org/documentation).
• Participate in regular design reviews: provide, and engage with, constructive feedback.
• Effectively convey design elements and interactions to the development team, including mobile first visual design and CSS specifications as needed.
• Ensure solution meets accessibility standards.
• Design and help implement aspects of the branding, information site, and other collateral for the service.

Skills and experience:

• Eight or more years of industry experience in UX design, interaction design, information architecture, UX strategy, user research, or similar field.
• Strong portfolio of work demonstrating experience applying user centered design, user analysis techniques, and responsive web design. Experience creating and applying design patterns a plus.
• Demonstrated experience leading complex projects with multiple stakeholders.
• Able to produce design artifacts with tools such as Adobe XD, Sketch, Photoshop, etc.
• Experience designing to meet WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards; ability to interpret and validate that a product meets global accessibility standards.
• Able to take complex information and communicate it clearly, concisely, and accurately.
• Excellent presentation skills.
• Ideal candidate has experience in technologies relating to scholarly communications or publishing. Experience with or understanding of authentication and identity management technologies a plus.
• Fluent in English.

Employment conditions:

This position will be subject to a temporary consultancy contract with the International Association of STM Publishers (STM) against a fixed or not-to-exceed fee and will not entail an employment contract. The first contract will be for 6 months at 0.25 FTE, open to further extensions and possibly at a different work-factor as the project requires.

About SeamlessAccess:

SeamlessAccess.org is a service, governed as a coalition between four organizations: GÉANT, Internet2, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), and the International Association of STM Publishers. Participants include researchers, service providers, libraries and identity providers and federation operators, vendors, publishers.

To apply:

To apply, please email your resume and a cover letter highlighting your relevant skills and experience and how it applies to the role and requirements outlined, to (contact@seamlessaccess.org).