Company Summary - Lead User Interface Designer
SMS Assist's vision is to make every property better. We serve more than 200,000 commercial and residential properties nationwide. We connect property owners in industries like retail and restaurant with a dense affiliate network that specializes in more than 55 trades like landscaping, plumbing, HVAC, and more. Our customer service organization leverages our proprietary One by SMS Assist cloud platform to process thousands of work orders on a daily basis.
Every day we strive to provide the best service to our customers through an entrepreneurial spirit, a passion for service, teamwork, and integrity. We offer a game room, fitness center, bike garage, SMS Serves philanthropy program, company events, a fun location along Chicago's Magnificent Mile, and more. SMS Assist is a Moxie Awards winner, Chicago Innovation Awards winner, a Top 100 Digital Company in Chicago and has been named to the Forbes Cloud 100 list for all four years of its existence! The list ranks the top 100 private cloud companies across four factors: market leadership, estimated valuation, operating metrics, and culture.
Job Summary - Lead User Interface Designer
The Lead User Interface Designer works closely with the UX team, SMS business leadership, product owners, and engineers in presenting user experiences that adhere to brand guidelines, follow our design system and meet user needs. This role will draw on their experience in visual design and accessibility to help lead the definition and creation of design solutions that address user needs and SMS Assist's business goals. The Lead User Interface Designer has experience supporting multiple projects and proactively managing deliverables and expectations. They will be instrumental in assessing the needs of our design system and prioritizing opportunities for its growth. They engage in effective dialog with designers and the engineering team to ensure design intent is communicated with clarity to improve the quality of product delivery.
The Lead User Interface Designerdemonstrates leadership in these areas of UX discipline:

• User Research
• Usability Testing
• Curating of design system
• Documenting design for developers
• Creation of prototypes
• Participating in Ideation/Brainstorming

Responsibilities

• Ensure design team produces elegant, smart, and usable designs for the web and mobile applications across multiple scrum teams
• Ensure product and design teams are leveraging our UX expertise properly to deliver easy-to-use experiences that empower our internal and external users and meet stakeholder expectations
• Lead human-centered design approach by implementing rapid testing and iteration of concepts across multiple scrum teams
• Ensure consistency across application experiences through application of design system and UX patterns
• Support development to ensure that design intent is communicated and understood and QA deliverables to identify and prioritize gaps across multiple scrum teams
• Identify collaboration opportunities and synergies across functional groups and design teams to reduce duplicative efforts, improve consistency, and accelerate delivery of value
• Demonstrate leadership in design thinking methodologies to empathize, learn, ideate, challenge stakeholders and UX peers, and iterate
• Ensure that visual designs meet WCAG 2.1 accessibility guidelines and provide training and guidance to designers
• Demonstrate leadership in Agile process to deliver design artifacts in a timely and effective manner across multiple scrum teams
• Develop presentations, storyboards, and client feedback mechanisms to communicate design process
• Lead user research activities, gathering requirements, identifying opportunities, and helping prioritize product roadmaps
• Research and share knowledge of the industry's latest UX & UI best practices and tools
• Foster a healthy team environment
• Work with team members across time zones
• Ensure confidentiality of internal and external data
• Perform ad-hoc projects and other duties as assigned

Professional Skills
These are the professional skills we would expect from an individual fully established in this role.

• Verbal Communication - Advanced
• Written Communication - Advanced
• Teamwork - Advanced
• Relationships - Advanced
• Negotiation - Proficient
• Organizational Awareness - Advanced
• Learning Agility - Advanced
• Analysis - Advanced
• Problem Solving - Advanced
• Process Orientation - Proficient
• Prioritization - Advanced

Role Specific Skills

• Speed and proficiency with UX applications to produce wireframes, prototypes and workflows
• Ability to create lightweight prototypes to test concepts
• Familiar leading creation of design system UI libraries
• Ability to present UX research to build empathy for users, UX deliverables to convey workflows, and UI comps to ensure design fidelity
• Ability to convey user experience through stories and frame problems for a diverse audience of stakeholders, helping them envision potential design opportunities
• Ability to craft presentations to facilitate communicating UX deliverables
• Working knowledge of usability principles, conventions, and techniques

People Management Skills

• Experience managing direct reports

Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience
• 10+ years of experience creating high-fidelity visual design and prototypes, working closely with team leads, peers, customers and developers from inception through implementation
• Experience designing enterprise UX and enterprise applications
• Experience collaborating with Product Management and Engineering counterparts

Other Relevant Qualifications
Please note, this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities and activities, and schedule may change at any time with or without notice.
SMS Assist is an Equal Opportunity Employer (EOE) that welcomes and encourages all applicants to apply regardless of age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identify and/or expression, national origin, disability, veteran status, marital or parental status, ancestry, citizenship status, pregnancy or other reasons prohibited by law.
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