Senior Product Designer
About Morningstar Investment Management
The Investment Management group is a global team guided by Morningstar’s investment principles focused on delivering great long-term investment results to help end-investors reach their financial goals. Morningstar® Managed Portfolios, our complete wealth management platform serving financial advisors, offers a broad lineup of strategies built with stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs to help meet an investor’s needs at each stage of their lifetime.
About this Role
We are looking for a Senior Product Designer for our Managed Portfolios group. This multi-talented individual will be involved in all parts of the design process: concept development, creative visualization, user research and testing, UX writing, system design, and prototyping. This person will work within a cross-functional, global team developing software for financial professionals. We seek a curious, entrepreneurial designer who loves the challenges of elegantly simplifying complex data, translating user needs into intuitive, rewarding interactions, and beautifully expressing our brand.
This position is based in our Chicago office.
You’ll be great at:
• Providing inspired solutions for complex navigation and information hierarchy challenges at a system level while also creating an elegant user-facing experience.
• Making bold design concepts and experiments that challenge conventional thinking and inspire our business and customers to be the best they can be.
• Testing your designs and experiments with our users – financial advisors and investors – in order to continuously improve the usability and desirability of our products.
• Documenting your best-loved and tested ideas in rigorous functional detail.
• Using design thinking methods expertly in day-to-day work, including collaborating with the team to successfully incorporate these methods into an Agile process.
• Making expert-level visual decisions around typography, composition, color, and data visualization.
• Producing all artifacts needed to visualize, communicate, and test product design direction at an expert level—including task flows, wireframes, low-fidelity prototypes, and high-fidelity comps.
• Coaching your teammates on how to make decisions around information structure, relationships, and strategy.
• Promoting 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 product and engineering teams to support the end-to-end vision of the product.
• Collaborating with an international team and working across oceans and cultures to perfect a global product for a global user base
• Promoting open discussion of new ideas, tough issues, and contrasting points of view.
You’ll also do things like:
• Persuade and lead others to invest in quality design and demonstrate the value of doing it right.
• Demonstrate exceptional stakeholder management skills, including effectively managing expectations and obtaining agreement on key objectives.
• Continuously strive to find better ways of doing things.
• Edit and generate clear and concise labels, prompts, and other messaging copy that guides the user and meets business needs.
• Collaborate with the product owner, visual designer, and engineers on your squad to make sound product decisions.
• Be proficient in core research skills, such as interviewing, analysis, and reporting techniques, and execute common types of user research with minimal guidance and supervision.
• Provide guidance and mentorship to junior team members.
Basic qualifications:
• Bachelor’s degree
• At least 5 years professional experience designing for software, web and/or digital products.
Preferred qualifications:
• Strong knowledge of Sketch, Invision, Microsoft Office Suite, and Mac OS X
• Knowledge of HTML and CSS
• Experience working with Design Systems
• Financial industry experience, particularly with financial advisors or managed account platforms
• Degree in a field related to human-computer interaction, design, library sciences, psychology, or communication
How to apply:
Please include a link to your online portfolio or attach pdf samples along with your resume.
About Morningstar
Morningstar brings inspired problem solvers together with one goal in mind—to empower investor success. At our core, we’re one of the world’s top investment research and data companies. But what sets us apart is how we take that data and research, and pair it with the latest technology and thoughtful design, to deliver insights with a purely independent view that address a wide range of needs for our customers. 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 their clients.
Our Design Culture
The Morningstar design team is dedicated to creating thoughtful 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 empower our users to deliver better 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, are driven to deliver user-centered outcomes, and are equally committed to craft and compassion.