User Experience Lead, Zoro
Title: User Experience Lead
Reports to: Matthew Deming | Sr. Manager, User Experience
Location(s): Chicago or Buffalo Grove
Company Overview
In the past seven 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 250+ working out of a 60,000+ square foot building, offering more than 2,000,000 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 Experience specialists. We are seeking a User Experience Lead to join our team and help us define, build, and optimize experiences for Zoro’s ecommerce website, internal applications, and associated services. The ideal candidate is a well-rounded UX practitioner with experience:
- Collaborating with leaders to envision innovative experiences;
- Leading product and project strategy, digging into and solving complex design challenges;
- Understanding and unearthing unmet customer needs;
- Guiding research and design processes;
- Mentoring junior team members; and
- Managing complex projects.
The User Experience Lead will own 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 Sr. Manager of User Experience and has no direct reports. This position can be based in Chicago or Buffalo Grove, IL.
Responsibilities
The User Experience Lead will:
- Lead design activities across a product team to shape a customer experience vision; develop, communicate, and implement processes and tactics to ensure product roadmap, including:
- Facilitating input from cross-functional teams
- Facilitating multi-stakeholder meetings/workshops
- Leveraging customer research and data
- Overseeing the development and ideation of design solutions
- Work closely with Product Owners to translate business requirements and user needs to develop product strategy and roadmap
- Guide early stage product discovery and definition through deep understanding of users, framing of the problem, evaluating current state experiences and areas of competitive disadvantage, designing concepts and models, etc.
- Collaborate with Product Owners, Engineering Leads, and other relevant stakeholders on strategy sessions, ideation, design, research activities, and testing of new product concepts
- Translates business requirements and user needs into tangible interaction design through detailed user flows, wireframes, and low-fidelity prototypes.
- Provide guidance, direction, and mentorship for junior UX team members to ensure quality of design delivery within the product team and beyond; manage team workflow through story writing and assignment
- Collaborates with the Sr. Manager of UX and other design delivery leads to streamline processes, workflows, and templates in support of lean and agile methodologies.
- Stays abreast of innovations in UX best practices, interaction design trends and patterns, and tools / topics of interest to the UX community.
- Contributes thought leadership and evangelizes the value of UX to the broader business through lunch & learns, workshops, and other activities.
Qualifications
- Training in Human-Centered Design, Design Thinking, Human Factors, or related field. A Masters in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Information Systems, or a related UX discipline is preferred.
- 7+ years of work experience in a UX role; prior ecommerce experience is preferred.
- 5+ years of experience with standard digital design tools and rapid prototyping software; Sketch + Invision preferred
- A portfolio of work that demonstrates process / approach, the ability to communicate informed design rationale, and an understanding of design, usability, and research best practices.
- Excellent communication, presentation, and persuasion skills; successful in building buy-in with stakeholders and senior management
- Experienced with delivery of UX 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.
- Practical knowledge of Google Analytics and behavioral analytics tools such as Clicktale, SessionCam, or HotJar.
- Experience with qualitative and quantitative user research methods and associated platforms, specifically UserTesting.com, Qualtrics, and Optimal Workshop
- Experience with A/B and multivariate test design and analysis; familiarity with Google Optimize or Optimizely is a plus.
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.