Senior User Experience Designer
Are you an outstanding experience designer with incredible intuition for simplifying UI and a head for business? Do you like the challenge of addressing previously unmet consumer travel research needs and aren't afraid to fail along the way? If you answered "yes" to both questions, we'd love to meet you. We are looking for a creative, pragmatic experience designer with information architecture and interactive design experience and the leadership skills to help our successful business reach even greater heights.
About UpTake:
We're a small, close-knit and focused team who value collaboration and results. We are the largest independent travel research site and we are looking to add the necessary consumer DNA to deliver on the promise of why we started UpTake - to help consumers make better, faster and more confident decisions about where to go, where to stay, what to do and where to eat.
We have talented, proven business and engineering teams in place and we are building our consumer product team. We recently hired a VP of Product and are investing to radically improve on consumer experience and to accelerate our rate of innovation. We are redesigning our organization and process to do so.
We believe that the best designs prove themselves in the marketplace. That's why we will use external benchmarking, consumer science, metrics and testing to inform our design intuition.
Our investors - Shasta Ventures and Trinity Ventures - are well established and proven investors. We are a fun and competitive bunch with a sunny downtown Palo Alto office & patio stumbling distance from Caltrain and great restaurants. We think creativity comes from happy, fearless and energetic people-so we excel at fostering a healthy life-work balance and a comfortable, casual environment. You'll find our culture, compensation and benefits - and the ability for you to have a huge impact - hard to beat.
About You:
You have a passion for solving interactive problems and finding the easiest, simplest way for users to get from point A to Z. You have strong visual skills with an eye for detail and can contribute to - or drive - the visual design. You are an accomplished design generalist with a passion for bringing projects from concept to realization and doing everything possible to ensure their success.
You're talented, confident, and highly capable-and you move at high velocity and enjoy pushing boundaries. You are a team player and excellent communicator and can make your opinion heard effectively and efficiently to help decide the best experience for the business and the consumers. You can articulate the value of your design to product managers and engineers as easily as you can talk information architecture, interactive and visual design with other designers. You can point to how business objectives are met via great user experiences. You appreciate healthy debates about data vs. design.
You take a user-centric approach and you think of external benchmarking, data and testing as tools to create the best possible consumer experience. You have the adaptability, persistence and attention to detail to produce multiple rounds of designs in pursuit of the most user-friendly solution. You enjoy being challenged.
You are a senior designer who can and wants to both "think" AND "do". We are a very hands-on, roll-your-sleeves-up-and-get-dirty team where the things you discover and create have widespread impact.
The "Must-haves" (and we mean it):
- 5+ years design on consumer online interactive experiences
- A great portfolio
- Familiarity with HTML, CSS, AJAX, jQuery etc.
- Experience across the entire product lifecycle (bonus: experience across channels)
- Ability to rapidly produce concepts and prototypes
- A sense of humor better than the average bear
- Experience working effectively with visual design