Title: Senior User Interface Designer
Reports to: Senior Manager, User Interface
Location(s): Chicago or Buffalo Grove
 

Company Overview
In the past eight years, Zoro has grown from a group of 6 people working out of a 2,000 square foot building, offering fewer than 100,000 products to a group of 300+ working out of 3 locations, offering more than 3,000,000 unique products. We are looking for passionate, driven people who want to join a high-energy, uber growth organization.
 

Position Description
Zoro is expanding its team of smart, passionate, and tremendously creative User Interface professionals. We are seeking a Senior User Interface Designer to join our team and help us define, design, and build experiences for Zoro’s ecommerce website, internal applications, and associated services.

The ideal candidate is a well-rounded UI practitioner with experience:

• Designing refined layouts, graphical elements, and high fidelity prototypes from wireframes and product specifications without requiring a high level of review
• Collaborating with leads to develop innovative experiences
• Employing product and design strategy, digging into and solving complex design challenges
• Contributing to and maintaining the federated Zoro Design System
• Leading the design of highly complex requests and assist those working on less complex requests
• Understanding and unearthing unmet customer needs and measuring their performance in the marketplace and ultimately optimizing them for success.

The Senior User Interface Designer will share the experience design vision within a cross-functional product team that is focused on either improvements to a specific experience on Zoro.com (e.g., Search, My Account) or to an internal application (e.g., CMS, Design System). 

This position reports directly to the Senior Manager of User Interface and has no direct reports. This position can be based in Chicago or Buffalo Grove, IL. 
 

Responsibilities
The Senior User Interface Designer will:

• Produce meticulous, beautiful user interface designs, taking into account brand guidelines and the Design System ecosystem
• Collaborate with Product Owners, Software Engineers, Quality Assurance Engineers, XD Leads, and other relevant stakeholders on strategy, ideation, design, research activities, and testing of new product concepts
• Translate business requirements and user needs into tangible interaction design through component-based designs that can be entered in to Zoro’s Design System and employed across all of Zoro.com
• Provide strategy and governance to the federated Zoro Design System community of practice, where the design, research, experience, testing and development teams converge to define, design, build and maintain our living Design System
• Stay abreast of innovations in UI best practices, interaction design trends and patterns, and tools / topics of interest to the UI community
• Participate in purposeful design critique, ensuring all areas of the business understand how and why they are reviewing work
• Contribute thought leadership and evangelizes the value of UI to the broader business through lunch & learns, workshops, and other activities

Qualifications

• Training in User Interface Design, Web Design, Product Design or related field.
• 5+ years of work experience in a UI role; prior ecommerce experience is preferred.
• Experience working directly with and/or on the creation of a design system is required.
• 5+ years of experience with standard digital design tools and rapid prototyping software; Sketch + Zeplin preferred
• A portfolio of work that demonstrates process / approach, the ability to communicate informed design rationale, and an understanding of design, usability, and interaction best practices.
• Great communication, presentation, and persuasion skills
• Experienced with delivery of UI artifacts within an agile or lean framework (e.g., design sprints, dual-track agile)
• Experience with translating complex problems into elegant design solutions
• Ability to juggle multiple priorities and effectively deliver in a dynamic environment
• Prior experience with managing and mentoring the work of others
• Knowledge of Atlassian JIRA and Confluence platforms for agile collaboration and workflow management
• Familiarity with web accessibility guidelines and standards (e.g., WCAG 2.1 AA and ADA Section 508 compliance) is preferred.
• Experience with delivering work across a development track, including the markup for and handoff to development and visual quality assurance of your own work
• Demonstrated experience in leading and facilitating design workshops and activities
• Demonstrated experience in presentation to executive-level stakeholders

You will be a great fit for the role if: 

• You are a compelling storyteller, able to build empathy and convey the mindset of users to the broader organization.
• You have the ability to ask, as well as answer, meaningful and impactful questions.
• You are an excellent listener with keen attention to detail.
• You love collaborating with others; they should also love collaborating with you.
• You are naturally inquisitive and love solving problems.
• You embrace ambiguity.
• You learn from failure.
• You are passionate about building, prototyping, and continually evolving digital products throughout the product lifecycle.
• You can convey concepts through sketches, flows, wireframes, clickable prototypes, etc. – whatever method you determine to be the most efficient and effective to gain alignment and support from your target audience.
• You’re a systems thinker; you can logically visualize complex systems and user interaction flows.
• You have the ability to learn new tools and do self-guided work within a fast-paced environment.

Zoro is an Equal Opportunity Workplace and an Affirmative Action Employer. 

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status.