Morningstar brings inspired problem-solvers together with one goal in mind—to help investors reach their financial goals. At our core, we’re one of the world’s top investment research and data companies. But where we set ourselves apart is how we use that data and research to serve a diverse range of users. Our investment data and research enable us to deliver analytics and insights with a purely independent view, and then we leverage the latest in technology and design to deliver an array of solutions that best meet our users’ needs. This foundation of research, data, technology and design uniquely positions us to provide a more complete set of services to investors all around the world—ultimately helping people make better decisions about their money, or the money they manage for millions of people all over the world.

The Morningstar design team is dedicated to creating thoughtfully-designed financial products and services so that people across the world can make the best investing decisions for themselves and their clients. We synthesize complex financial information into experiences that help deliver better investing outcomes. We do this by not only creating the look and feel of a product, but also driving product direction: prioritizing the biggest opportunities to support our users and the business, while maintaining a strong sense of product ownership and its resulting success. The design organization is made up of several disciplines—visual, UX, communications, content, and research—united to help each other, and the whole company, grow. We’re always seeking designers who are motivated, driven to deliver user-centered outcomes, with an equal commitment to craft and compassion.

We’re looking for a UX Design Manager for our Data, Research, and Indexes Products (DRIP) and Individual Investor teams. This group is focused on getting Morningstar’s data and research into the hands of investors, either directly through Morningstar.com or through advisors and asset managers that consume our IP through data feeds, market dashboards, and other research portals.

In this role, you’ll be a coach but also a player. You’ll inspire, direct, and teach UX and Visual Designers, Content Strategists, and User Researchers to ask and answer key questions for users and help grow our business. Your daily contributions will demonstrate how that’s done – working with product teams to orchestrate intelligent and delightful end-to-end experiences that are powered by clear and relevant content. You’ll use your strong UX and service design skills to design holistic user journeys that help direct all of our audiences to the services and products that best serve their needs. Your deep knowledge of our audience and business helps our customers feel like they have concierge service to premiere advisor content. You craft these end-to-end journeys while agonizing over the details, like the word choice in a call to action. You’ll rationalize your choices with data, user research, and your own rich experience. You will routinely check in with stakeholders across the company to keep them in the loop and elevate the contributions of other Morningstar designers.

This position is based in our Chicago office.

You'll need to be great at:

• Coaching and growing talent.
• Focusing on user outcomes and business impact when solving problems and measuring both.
• Mastering complex information, and able to simplify it so that everyone can understand it.
• Being so familiar with your product subject matter that you know what questions need to be answered during product creation, and you can help others learn to ask and answer those questions without your help.
• Being able to offer at least two solutions to every problem. You don’t need hand-holding, and you’re a curious self-starter.
• Being able to build meaningful relationships across multidisciplinary teams to cultivate empathy for design initiatives, while also moving teams quickly toward releasable experiences through crafting minimum viable products.
• Thriving in an agile work environment, including the ability to embrace iterative product development while maintaining a cohesive and holistic view of the overall design experience.
• Driving collaboration and bringing teams together to solve problems.
• Being able to adapt your leadership style based on what each contributor needs to thrive. This includes providing art direction and constructive critique from every angle of the experience.
• Being able to have hard conversations when necessary around performance and product scope.
• Regularly reflecting on your work and interested in constructive critique of your own communication and coaching.
• Being able to keep things positive and clear when communicating.

• Understanding at an expert level how to provide solutions for complex navigation and information hierarchy challenges at a system level while also supporting a strong user-facing experience.
• Coaching your teammates on how to make decisions around information structure, relationships, and strategy.
• Expertly utilizing design thinking methods in day-to-day work, including collaborating with the team to successfully incorporate these methods into an Agile process.
• Coaching other designers, business leads, and stakeholders in the values and methods of design thinking to solve user needs and realize business goals while also supporting our design culture.
• Identifying connections between products and communication channels and guiding teams to build and plan for coordinated solutions.
• Partnering with the product owners and engineering leads to support the end-to-end vision of the product.

You’ll also do things like:

• Lead and mentor designers to deliver Morningstar data, services, methodologies, editorial content and other content to clients and end users.
• Design and oversee existing and future user experiences for data, research, and index products as well as Morningstar.com. This includes helping junior talent understand product requirements to develop wireframes, sketches, diagrams, designs, prototypes with and without clear direction. People will look to you to swiftly synthesize and articulate complex problems, and to generate more than one potential solution.
• Advocate for the internal and external users of our products, tying their goals to business goals through data and user research.
• Effectively manage multiple products, projects, people and deadlines. This includes oversight of remote contractors that we may engage from time to time.
• Maintain rich contacts within a wide swath of products across the company, not just inside your business area.
• Communicate frequently with stakeholders.
• Participate in the larger internal and external Design community by contributing to special interest groups and helping facilitate events/trainings.
• Be an obsessive advocate for user-centered research and for a “design thinking” approach to creative problem solving during the entire development process, including product marketing.
• Participate in user-centered research with customers through interviews, usability testing, usage analysis, and participatory design.
• Use creative facilitation techniques and taking the lead at internal meetings and client meetings/calls to understand the problem space and foster a shared vision of the future.
• Recruit and help retain design talent.
• Lead the design team through definition, estimation, and scoping for all design tasks; pushing for accountability at every stage.
• Guide the team in communicating design solutions to development teams through prototypes, detailed specifications, and similar types of communication documents.
• Be curious about new technology and pushing experiences to be current and modern.
• Be able to write and present effectively; you’ll need to guide and persuade many opinions. 

Basic Qualifications: 

• Bachelor’s degree
• 7 years of relevant professional experience is required, including leading and managing a design team

Morningstar is an equal opportunity employer.