Freelance Senior Experience Designer
Chicago, IL

Job Description

Isobar is a digital agency committed to delivering robust, innovative, world-class solutions. We design and build everything from content-rich brand experiences to sophisticated business platforms to dynamic media and entertainment apps. Isobar's breadth of clientele means that our people have a broad range of industry and platform opportunities to explore. Full collaboration between our technology, user experience, creative, business, and marketing teams ensures we create complex, award-winning, slam-dunk work.

Experience Strategy & Design (ESD) at Isobar

User-centered design is core to how we conceive, design, and deliver innovative digital experiences at Isobar. We consider the experience practice to be the nexus between business, users, and design expertise. We expect every member of our experience team to be able to analyze, design, and execute across these three realms, while working in close collaboration with counterparts in other disciplines as well as with our clients.

At Isobar we value people who have a passion for great design, relish tackling complex problems, are able to communicate ideas effectively, and are eager to learn and adapt to new technologies, industries, and methods. From the most junior designers to the most senior ESD leadership, we expect our experience practitioners to be hands-on at every stage of the digital product creation process. They must be able to grasp complex business objectives and craft a differentiating approach that exceeds the expectations of users-all while ensuring the product meets its technology requirements. Post-delivery, our experience professionals frequently oversee the product's continuous improvement as a result of iterative testing, changing market demands, updated business requirements, new user needs, etc.

Senior Experience Designers at Isobar are not expected to have knowledge across the entire discipline. To ensure they get the resources they need to be successful, we provide mentorship and training opportunities.

Position Overview

Isobar is seeking a Senior Experience Designer who is committed to creating multi-channel, interactive experiences. We hire creative problem solvers who are experienced with the user-centered design process and who have a passion for creating interfaces that are intuitive and a joy to use.

The Senior Experience Designer will work under the direction and guidance of more senior ESD team members based on project assignments, assisting with ESD activities and deliverables for complex consumer and corporate digital initiatives. The Senior Experience Designer will be involved in projects from the beginning, and maintain the experience vision from concept to finished product.

Responsibilities

* Work collaboratively as part of an interdisciplinary team that includes other experience designers, visual designers, technologists, business analysts, strategists, and project managers
* Understand user needs through user research and requirements-gathering workshops
* Conceptualize and design digital experiences under the guidance of an Experience Design Lead
* Create personas, journeys, scenarios, wireframes, prototypes, workflows, and interaction and experience models
* Explain design decisions and rationale to both internal and external team members
* Plan and conduct usability testing, leveraging the findings to evolve the design
* Participate in quality assurance testing activities from an ESD perspective
* Aggregate and communicate research findings, conceptual ideas, detailed design, and design rationale, both verbally and visually
* Be a constant advocate for great user-centered design
* Participate in client presentations, workshops, and discussions

Required Experience / Skills

* At least 3-4 years of experience in digital design practice
* Strong knowledge of user-centered design principles, methodologies, and best practices, particularly as applied to web- and mobile-based applications
* Demonstrated experience and portfolio examples of design problem-solving efforts for digital products or services
* Excellent communication, organization, and team interaction skills
* Proficiency with design and prototyping tools such as Sketch, InDesign, InVision, and Axure
* Knowledge of channel factors and considerations (responsive and adaptive web, native mobile and tablet, TV, wearables)
* Knowledge of web technologies and associated accessibility standards (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, native)