Senior User Experience Specialist

Howden is a collective – a group of talented and passionate people all around the world. Together, we have pushed the boundaries of insurance. We are united by a shared passion and no-limits mindset, and our strength lies in our ability to collaborate as a powerful international team comprised of 18,000 employees spanning over 100 countries.

People join Howden for many different reasons, but they stay for the same one: our culture. It’s what sets us apart, and the reason our employees have been turning down headhunters for years. Whatever your priorities – work / life balance, career progression, sustainability, volunteering – you’ll find like-minded people driving change at Howden.

We are looking for an exceptional senior-level User Experience Specialist to join our Experience team who will play a pivotal role in shaping and elevating our digital customer experiences as part of the customer journey. 

You will own and lead initiatives to identify, explore and validate opportunities for innovation and enhancement within our digital products and services. Balancing leadership with hands-on execution with cross-functional teams, you’ll drive projects from discovery through to development hand-off, ensuring that solutions are both user-centric and aligned with business goals across the group on wide-ranging projects spanning multiple brands and business areas.

As a holistic and empathetic thinker, you'll be passionate about understanding our users (whether clients, colleagues, or partners) and their needs across the end-to-end brand experience. You'll use insights to help shape the vision. 

• Function both as an individual contributor and project leader, guiding multidisciplinary team to deliver solutions.
• Manage and execute UX work from project goals to execution, validation and final hand off to development.
• Work with product owners and other stakeholders to define project requirements and roadmaps.
• Understand and balance business, user and technical requirements.
• Plan, facilitate, and lead user-centred design workshops and ideation sessions.
• Deliver experiences that are optimised for a wide range of devices and interfaces, including phones, tablets, and desktops.
• Work closely with the brand team to ensure consistent brand experiences.
• Advocate of UX best practice in cross-functional teams including design, product, content, development, SEO and marketing.
• Facilitate UX and design thinking within your teams.
• Own and develop unified design systems in order to ensure consistency across design solutions.
• Develop and mentor other team members and contribute to the advancement of the UX practice within the business.
• Advocate and understand accessibility principles.

• 6 - 10+ years of UX experience, with a strong foundation in user-centred design principles.
• Confident in communicating professionally with people across the business using a range of techniques to adapt to language and cultural barriers to gain stakeholder buy-in.
• Influencing and advocating for the user/customer to non-design audiences
• Experience with varied design and research processes and frameworks, including qualitative and quantitative research, product prototyping and testing, industry design patterns, future visioning and strategic design
• Interpreting insights gained from existing and new research, then applying these to a project.
• Prior experience running and/or facilitating Customer Journey and Impact Mapping workshops
• Fluent in using creative and prototyping tools, such as Figma
• Self-motivated and proactive with a good sense of ownership, able to work well under pressure, prioritise tasks and adapt to last-minute requests from multiple stakeholders
• Ability to work in collaborative, agile teams – you will thrive in the kind of environment where you can share and reciprocate knowledge and establish best practices within the wider business, pushing for the adoption of new and innovative methodologies
• Have an outstanding understanding of the User Centred Design process, ensuring usability & accessibility best practices are adhered to throughout the UX design processes
• Experience in customer experience optimisation, working with analytics data, optimisation tools and behaviour analysis software to gain insight into current experience, and generate test hypotheses. Validate this hypothesis by running A/B and multivariate testing in order to find the best user experience.
• Up-to-date with the latest device/platform/browser limitations and capabilities, as well as accessibility criteria and design best practice, and how to accommodate in all proposed solutions
• Your portfolio will include a diverse range of projects demonstrating robust design methodologies, Design Thinking and lean experimentation, Future visioning, Innovation and Design strategy

• Agency experience advantageous
• Desire to innovate, develop skills and be curious about new digital trends, technology and the opportunities they may present
• Experience working with both B2B and B2C
• Imaginative and enthusiastic creative thinker and problem solver, who exhibits a natural instinct for useful and usable design 
• Strong visual design skills – creating engaging user experiences across multiple devices and platforms
• An understanding of front-end development practices and the importance of good design handoff

A career that you define. At Howden, we value diversity – there is no one Howden type. Instead, we’re looking for individuals who share the same values as us:

• Our successes have all come from someone brave enough to try something new

• We support each other in the small everyday moments and the bigger challenges

• We are determined to make a positive difference at work and beyond

We're committed to providing reasonable accommodations at Howden to ensure that our positions align well with your needs.  Besides the usual adjustments such as software, IT, and office setups, we can also accommodate other changes such as flexible hours* or hybrid working*.

If you're excited by this role but have some doubts about whether it’s the right fit for you, send us your application – if your profile fits the role’s criteria, we will be in touch to assist in helping to get you set up with any reasonable adjustments you may require.

*Not all positions can accommodate changes to working hours or locations. Reach out to your Recruitment Partner if you want to know more.