Contract Senior Digital Product Designer

Location: London, Hybrid 3 days per week in the office

Department: Product Design

Hours: Full-Time

Contract type: Contract

Specific request: Must wear shirt and smart trousers, no jeans.

About YLD:

Everything we do is to empower our clients to move forward.  Our purpose is to help our clients develop the capabilities they need to outperform their competitors. Our success is a consequence of ensuring our clients are successful. Our company is built on extraordinary people; we aim to attract, inspire, develop and retain them. YLD is a software engineering and design consultancy; we create digital capabilities for our clients that last beyond our engagement. We have offices in London, Lisbon, Porto.

About The Role:

We’re looking for an experienced, hands-on Digital Product Designer, with strong UX and product strategy skills, as well as great Visual Design and UI skills to join our Product Design team on a contract basis, working from the client’s London office 3 days per week.

This role requires smart attire including a shirt and trousers (no jeans).

About You:

The ideal person is someone who can bring their drive, passion and experience to our work and processes, working potentially as the solo designer in a cross-functional team, alongside engineers, currently on a remote basis, but with access to our offices in central London.

We expect that you have a proven successful background in Digital Product Design and that you are comfortably familiar with a combination of specialisms, such as UX Design, Product Strategy, Service Design, and UI Design; a blend of these skills is a big advantage, but your core skills and real strength really sits in UX and Visual Design. Experience working with, or a good knowledge of, implementing Design Systems and web accessibility would be a big bonus too.

As an experienced Digital Product Designer, we assume that you have strong UX Design & Research skills, and as someone who is also a good Interaction Designer, you’ll have a deep understanding of Information Architecture.

We strongly support that you have some kind of official UX training, as well as a substantial amount of real-life professional experience. An interest or experience in AI and open AI would be an extra welcomed bonus, though not expected, nor required.

(Coding ability would be a benefit, but it is in no way essential - HTML, CSS, JS, Swift, or any other language.)

Technical competencies:

• You can take the long-term vision and help define it into a product design strategy, composed of complex service and product design projects;
• You know how to visualise responsive websites and applications, and the thought processes required;
• You make good structural design decisions for feature sets that are well-defined or limited in scope;
• You’ll deliver quality design work and inspire our clients to work towards these standards;
• You can balance relatively complex user, business, and technical requirements to arrive at sound information-architecture designs;
• When it comes to visual outputs, you always base your decisions on solid visual design principles and are proficient in using the right tool for the job;
• You know how to use visual design to create excitement, yet keeping it functional;
• You can happily and expertly build complex, accurate wireframes, following existing visual-design guidelines;
• You expertly collaborate with product teams to understand how all aspects of a product’s functionality would work within an established visual design framework;
• You can define and document new interaction design patterns specific to a product or platform;
• You’re comfortable in the design software of your choice, but generally software agnostic with a keen ability to pick up a new one quickly, should it be required (e.g. Figma, Framer, Adobe XD, Sketch, Marvel, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.);
• You have a very hands-on approach to User Research and Usability Testing;
• You employ user feedback techniques to influence design decisions.

Non-technical competencies:

• Your ability to work autonomously means that you’re equally comfortable working in a fully remote environment, as you would be in an office environment;
• You can work closely with the rest of the product team, including front and back-end engineers, and PO /PM to ensure implementation is of a high standard and quality;
• Your experience allows you to understand the business as a whole, and to identify proactively where your / our impact can be bigger;
• You’re able to challenge your team to think critically in solving problems;
• You can facilitate (or lead) effective problem-solving in meetings and group settings, or whenever needed;
• You’re happy and comfortable taking part in design critiques, and also in having your own work critiqued;
• You have a combination of experience across designing for mobile and web user-focused applications, as well as denser, information-rich interfaces.

What we'd like to see from you:

• A portfolio (pdf, presentation or website) demonstrating critical thinking, creativity and visual design
• Be able to talk about and clearly explain and show your thought process, approach and strategy in connection to your finished work
• CV outlining any professional experience and creative training/education, incl. any kind of official UX / UI training that you may have
• All written documents must be sent in English

What you’ll get in return:

• The chance to work in an exciting industry on a rewarding product where you will have a chance to develop and grow your skills in a fast-moving business

Our typical Recruitment Process looks like this:

• 1st Interview with someone from the Talent team (30/45 mins)
• Interview & Portfolio Review with Head of Product Design and one Senior Designer (~1h30)
• Call with Client Partner of the Project (15-30 min)

We live and breathe our values, and know you will too:

• Growing every day
• Including everyone
• Relationships built on honesty and ethics
• Inspiring solutions
• Winning together

We’re an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity of all kinds. We don’t discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, pregnancy or maternity, age, marital status, or disability status. Likewise, we also offer a remote-first working environment, meaning that flexible working and work-life balance come as standard for all employees.