July 2017: Informal Pub Meetup

In what is now a beloved summer tradition, it’s time to replace energizing presentations and deep UX thoughts with a lighter event befitting the season. Let’s savour that summer feeling with a July uxWaterloo session that features informal talk, some of it even UX-related, and drinks. As befits any self-respecting tradition, we do this every July and August and the laid-back atmosphere and conversations are a welcome addition to any summer schedule. Join us!

And, as has become a yearly tradition, count on hearing from Bob and Mark with an an update on Fluxible 2017, Canada’s UX Festival! You’ve been warned…

Please register for this free event

Thursday July 27, 2017
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Abe Erb Brewing
15 King Street South, Uptown Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario

Job: UI/UX Developer at Equitable Life of Canada

Description

Equitable Life of Canada is looking for an experienced UI/UX developer for a 3-4 month project to redesign our salesforce web portal. This exciting opportunity allows you to redesign the portal from the ground up using industry best practices and innovative ideas.

As a UX designer at Equitable, you will interact regularly with the project team, project stakeholders, and end users to come up with easy to use designs that are innovative and engaging.

What you will do

• Identify design problems in current applications and devise elegant solutions
• Turn concepts into mockups that lead to intuitive user experiences
• Make strategic design and user-experience decisions related to core, and new functions and features based on research and analysis
• Take a user-centered design approach and rapidly test and iterate your designs
• Take smart risks and champion new ideas
• Work ahead of and create assets (images, HTML, CSS) for the developers
• Facilitate design sessions and use iterative UX techniques to transform findings and feedback into an informed user-centric design
• Lead design sprints and collaborative working sessions with team members and partner stakeholders
• Ensure level AA accessibility compliance (following standards for Ontario, Canada)
• Ensure designs are mobile responsive

What you need

• 2-4 years’ experience working in UX for web-based platforms.
• Experience in user research, interaction design and visual design for the web.
• Strong creative research, writing, and design skills.
• Strong communication skills, but better listening skills.
• Experience with wireframe software

Nice to have

• Ability to create interactive prototypes in HTML, JavaScript, CSS or other tools
• Experience working in Agile development environment

Education

• 3-year diploma or 4-year degree in design, computer science, human-computer interaction, or similar

How to apply

Please send your resume and cover letter to Lisa Pagnacco at lpagnacco@equitable.ca. Please include your portfolio and/or samples of your work to be considered for this position.

Job: UX Designer at Cognitive Systems

Founded in 2014, Cognitive Systems Corp. began with the goal of changing the way wireless is used. The founders drew on their extensive expertise in silicon design, RF, and encryption to build a cognitive radio platform. Together, they built a vertically-integrated platform and product line-up that enables wireless signals to be used in new ways.

Now Cognitive Systems is looking for a UX Designer (Web & Mobile Applications) for their Waterloo office.

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver wireframes, user stories, user journeys, and mockups optimized for a wide range of devices and interfaces for customers and/or internal engineering teams
• Translate concepts into wireframes and mockups that lead to intuitive user experiences
• Identify design problems in current applications and devise elegant solutions
• Make strategic design and user-experience decisions related to core, and new, functions and features based on research and analysis
• Take a user-centered design approach and rapidly test and iterate your designs
• Create assets for the developers
• Collaborate with other team members and stakeholders
• Take smart risks and champion new ideas

Requirements

• Three or more years of UX design experience
• Expertise in UX software such as InVision, UXPin, Sketch. Basic HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript skills are a plus.
• Extensive experience in using UX design best practices to design solutions, and a deep understanding of mobile-first and responsive design.
• A solid grasp of user-centered design and testing methodologies, subsystems, and usability and accessibility concerns.
• Ability to iterate your designs and solutions efficiently and intelligently.
• Ability to clearly and effectively communicate design processes, ideas, and solutions to teams and clients.
• A clear understanding of the importance of user-centered design.
• Be excited about collaborating and communicating closely with teams and other stakeholders via a distributed model to regularly deliver design solutions for approval.
• Be willing to help teammates, share knowledge and experience with them, and learn from them
• Be open to receiving feedback and constructive criticism.
• Be passionate about all things UX and other areas of design and innovation. Research and showcase knowledge in the industry’s latest trends and technologies

Send your resume at careers@cognitivesystems.com and be sure to include short cover letter/email on why they should hire you.

Job: Senior User Experience Designer (Cloud Intelligent Assistance) at NetSuite

Netsuite is looking for a Senior User Experience Designer – NetSuite Cloud Intelligent Assistance.

Are you ready to take on the next biggest challenge in your career?  Do you thrive in an entrepreneurial environment that delivers industry leading cloud applications? Oracle NetSuite is building a next-generation, ERP cloud suite that is powering some of the world’s highest growth medium sized companies. If you’re looking to share your unique perspective and ideas at a collaborative table and help equip all kinds of businesses achieve their visions, check us out.

Position Summary

We’re looking for a new member of our global Experience Design Team to work out of Kitchener-Waterloo office. Our team lives to bring delight to our enterprise software products, and you will too!

As a Senior User Experience Designer, you are a creative problem solver with a passion for providing innovative & engaging designs that are easy to use. Specifically, you have a nibble, imaginative mind that looks to design for the future: NetSuite’s Intelligent Assistance projects will make the most involved, esoteric and complicated workflows as easy as pie.

You’ll work with a cross-functional group of designers, developers & product managers on Intelligent Assistance functionality, as your home team, using a combination of best practice and innovation, you’ll help our team create a strong, best-in-class experience. You’ll also partner with other UX Designers and their cross-functional teams on projects that would benefit through the incorporation of adaptive and contextual Intelligent User Interface functionality. Whoa, that’s exciting. THE FUTURE IS NOW.

You understand users. You design to solve problems. You see elegance and power in simple interactions. You can gather requirements, make decisions, present ideas, and work collaboratively to come up with viable solutions.

Responsibilities

• Hands-on creative problem solving in a cloud-driven enterprise software system.
• Work with a multi-disciplined team of designers, user researchers and product managers in a fast-paced, dynamic, agile environment, balancing business value, technology, user needs, and operational costs.
• Turn actionable user research & high level product requirements into high-quality design deliverables that communicate design solutions and facilitate discussion, including user flows & wireframes.
• Facilitate design sessions, and use iterative UX techniques to synthesize findings and feedback into an informed experience design.
• Make informed decisions: present design alternatives and effectively communicate rationale and trade-offs, and react quickly and confidently to any changes in project plans.
• Demonstrate a passion for iteration and eagerness to receive feedback, thoughtfully incorporating user, UX team member, developer & product manager responses into design revisions.
• Prioritize multiple projects of varying timelines, degrees of complexity and scope.

Qualifications

• Degree in Product Design, Human Factors, Human Computer Interaction or related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Minimum 5 years working in the field of UX Design. Experience with “big data software” a huge plus.
• Experience and interest in machine learning, artificial intelligence and business intelligence a huge asset.
• Online portfolio demonstrating your problem-solving ability: problem analysis, personas, scenarios, user journeys, sketches, wireframes, prototypes, task-flows or other relevant design artifacts.
• Analytical and strategic mindset. We privilege how you think over pixel-perfect visual design skills.
• Flexibility to work with geographically distributed teams
• Leadership abilities with exceptional interpersonal skills
• Excellent communication skills.
• Experience working in Agile Development methodology is a plus.
• Experience in User Research and Usability Testing is an asset.
• Front end web design experience (HTML, CSS) is an asset.

As part of Oracle’s employment process candidates will be required to complete a pre-employment screening process, prior to an offer being made. This will involve identity and employment verification, salary verification, professional references, education verification and professional qualifications and memberships (if applicable).

Oracle is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability and protected veterans status or any other characteristic protected by law.

To apply, please email your resume and portfolio to Gary Good: gary.g.good@oracle.com.

Job ID: 17000OM3

Job: UX Designer at MappedIn

MappedIn is looking for a UX Designer for their Kitchener office.

Who we are and what we do

Mappedin is building the leading platform for businesses to help their customers search and discover the indoors. Our story starts at the University of Waterloo, when the founders wished they had a way to navigate the sprawling campus. The old, out-of-date building plans posted on walls seemed painfully primitive in today’s digital world. They quickly realized the same challenge existed among many indoor spaces. To enable search and navigation indoors, Mappedin set out to build the best tools for property owners to manage their dynamic spaces. Mappedin works with the ten largest malls in Canada, the largest retail REITs in the US, and in stores, hospitals, campuses, and airports around the world.

At Mappedin, we have a strong culture of design. One of our founders is a designer himself so design has been embedded into the product development process from the beginning. We firmly believe that design plays an integral role in creating the best possible product that is used by millions of people.

Who you are and what you’ll do

You are aware and excited about new design concepts and love to learn. We expect you to be passionate about design that is research and data-driven. You don’t have to know how to code, but you’ll need to be able to interact intelligently with developers who will be bringing your designs to life.

As part of the Product Strategy team and reporting to the Head of Product Strategy, you will own UX design from beginning to end:

• Define and execute UX process across Mappedin
• Validate product designs through usability studies
• Run user story mapping sessions / develop user journey maps
• Develop & maintain user personas
• Build and test design prototypes
• Contribute to information architecture of Mappedin’s products
• Effectively communicate designs using mockups, wireframes and written descriptions
• Learn and relate to Mappedin’s customers as well as your colleagues in product management
• Collaborate with your peers in software development to help guide them towards building the most usable version of our products
• Embrace design challenges that come from designing for emerging platforms like large screen interactive displays

The ideal candidate likely has experience in one or more of the following areas as well:

• Brought SaaS products to market, spanning some or all of the spectrum of research, ideation, product validation, usability testing and iterative improvements post-launch
• Talked to customers in a design capacity where you worked to understand business pains, find insights for new opportunities and built empathy with end users
• Made iterative improvements based on customer usage data
• Worked collaboratively with other business units (Development, Operations, Sales, Marketing, etc.) to identify problems worth solving and prioritized solutions
• Designed whitelabeled solutions
• Designed for interfaces driven by user generated content

What are some challenges?

Given the rapid growth of Mappedin over the past couple years (we’ve tripled in revenue each year for the last 2 years!) there are definitely some growing pains as we figure out how to mature our processes and build new products for emerging markets. The Product Strategy team will look to you to help guide how Mappedin can bring consistency to our design process while maintaining our flair for the creative and innovative.

We are currently in the midst of a transition between agency-style design to product-style design. Up until now, we’ve had more of a consultative approach to our work, but having recently found a very strong product-market fit in the REIT space, we are well underway transitioning to building for the market instead of an individual customer. We have the opportunity to apply our history of design excellence to this new challenge, but we’re looking for your help to make it happen. Change is hard so you’ll need to be prepared to persevere through the hard times in order to work towards a better future.

Behind the scenes

Our tool set currently includes Sketch, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop, but we are firm believers in supplying whatever tools are necessary for you to do your best work. Our final products are most often built using HTML/CSS/JavaScript, so some familiarity with their strengths and weaknesses is an asset, but not necessary.

There’s a lot of trust here at Mappedin. We work flexible hours, have a flexible vacation policy and work to provide whatever hardware or office equipment you want to help you do your best work. We will do whatever it takes to get things done if we said we would do it. We stay curious and will always ask each other questions, rarely making assumptions. We recognize that we are all different and will challenge each other’s views and perceptions from time to time, resulting in constructive and healthy debates, but that never stops us from all eating lunch together every day. If you want to join our sports team, there’s a blank bright orange jersey here waiting for your name to be printed on it.

Lastly, if you’re allergic to cats, don’t worry! Our office cat stays on the other side of the office and won’t bother you unless you decide to work in the collab area there.

Apply on the MappedIn website.

June 2017: Designing for business goals

As designers, it is often second-nature for us to advocate for and empathize with end-users and customers. But in order for our solutions to be robust and sustainable, it is crucial to empathize with our business stakeholders as well.

In this talk, Computer Scientist, business-grad and designer, Ali Rushdan Tariq, will be discussing how listening to and tailoring our solutions to business goals will make us better designers. While he cannot guarantee that this talk will take the place of an MBA education, he will share a few tips and lessons learned from business school and argue how they can be applied to the practise of design without feeling like losing your soul.

Ali is a Design Lead at the Manulife RED Lab, where he helps untangle business problems through the lens of user-centered design. Previously, after earning his MBA from Ivey Business School, he decided to ditch the corporate life in favour of running a startup out of Velocity Garage. His writings on creativity, innovation, and design have been published on various outlets including Fast Company and the InVision blog.

Please register for this free event

Thursday June 15, 2017
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Communitech Hub, 3rd floor theatre
[View on Google Maps]

Job: Senior Interaction Designer at Thalmic Labs

About you

Joy for you comes from finding creative ways to reconcile a mix of user insights, product requirements, and technical capabilities into the most compelling and desirable product experiences. You seek to understand and shape the big picture, but also love rolling up your sleeves and digging into the details. You bring the experience of proven successes (and occasional failures), and can lend that insight into helping to drive and elevate the practice of interaction design at Thalmic. You advocate tirelessly on behalf of the user and never pass up an opportunity to solicit their feedback. You are looking to make an impact and see wearable technology as the industry to do just that.

What you will do

• Contribute to the overall vision and user strategy for Thalmic products, working closely with other designers, product managers, marketing, and engineers to ensure designs are successfully brought to life.
• Help evolve and champion a Design Language System for next-gen Thalmic products that defines interaction models and patterns for multi-platform experiences (wearable, mobile, web).
• Distill user insights and product requirements into simple and intuitive designs, using sketches, storyboards, wireframes, and/or interactive prototypes to communicate your ideas.
• Generate multiple concepts that fulfill product scenarios and present in the context of informal and formal reviews. Use data and best practices to advocate a strong point of view, while being open to feedback from other stakeholders.
• Lead design sprints, exploratory design studios, and other collaborative working sessions with team members and partner stakeholders.
• Leverage your knowledge of user research methodologies to iteratively test and validate designs, gathering data-driven insights to champion for change.
• Help drive schedule and direction for interaction design deliverables, working with other designers to ensure quality and timeliness are met.
• Work closely with developers to ensure implementation adheres to design specifications and to resolve situations when technical capabilities and design needs do not align.
• Bring thought leadership within and outside of the UX team in the form of collaboration, feedback, mentoring, and an advocacy for user-centric design.

What you need

• A strong portfolio demonstrating a diversity of experience and strong system-level thinking. It should showcase your design process, from ideation through to the final design, and clearly state your individual contribution to each project/product.
• Degree in a relevant field (Interaction Design, Human Computer Interaction, etc.)
• Industry experience covering a diverse range of products and platforms; consumer product experience is highly desired. You bring first-hand knowledge of what it takes to ship a product to market.
• Advanced experience with the principles and concepts of user-centred design, information architecture, usability testing, and UX best practices.
• Deep knowledge of a mobile best practices and guidelines, including the Apple Human Interface and Android Guidelines.
• Demonstrated ability to plan and execute usability tests and other user research, showing how results were analyzed and translated into prioritized recommendations.
• Passion for emerging technologies and a hunger to innovate. Comfortable working in ambiguous conditions and able to adapt quickly.
• Proficiency with industry tools, such as Sketch, Invision, Adobe CSS, Flinto, Principle, or equivalent.

Bonus points for

• Being comfortable and open to working in other design areas as needed, including visual or motion design, and on multiple platforms (web, desktop, etc.)
• Ability to create interactive prototypes in Flash, AfterEffects, Maya, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, or other tools

Feel like you can’t tick all the boxes above? If you have some of the skills and experience that we’re looking for and are willing to use your talent to learn the rest, we encourage you to apply!

Why Thalmic

Day-to-day, we challenge each other to constantly raise the bar, encourage unconventional thinking to achieve innovative breakthroughs, and are passionately committed to surpassing our goals. We advocate a healthy lifestyle and promote continuous learning in a flexible work environment. Most of all, we set visionary goals, and we’re passionate about building the best, most impactful products that people will love.

About us

Thalmic is a hardware + software company building exciting technologies that will shape the future of human-computer interaction, backed by a world-class team of investors including Intel Capital, Spark Capital and The Amazon Alexa Fund.

We announced our first product, the Myo gesture control armband, in 2013, and pre-sold over 10,000 units in the first 48 hours. Myo is now shipping worldwide and has gone on to win numerous awards, including Digital Trends’ “Best of CES 2014” Award for Cool Tech.

Apply online here.

Job: Senior Visual Designer at Thalmic Labs

About you

You are passionate about solving real world problems for users in visually innovative and compelling ways. You bring experience in leading design thinking activities, systematically and collaboratively building a point of view that you can champion with ease. You willingly roll up your sleeves and contribute in a hands-on way, leveraging an exceptional eye for detail and a keen sense of design. Your track record of proven successes (and occasional failures) equip you with the insight needed to drive and elevate the practice of visual design at Thalmic. You are looking to make an impact and see wearable technology as the industry to do just that.

What you will do

• Contribute to the overall vision and user strategy for Thalmic products, from concept exploration through implementation, working closely with other designers, product managers, marketing, and engineers, to bring simple, intuitive, and beautiful products to life.
• Lead and drive the initial creative process, working with other designers to build and champion a Design Language System for next-gen Thalmic products that span multiple platforms (wearable, mobile, and web).
• Drive visual direction from concept to ship, producing high-quality visuals in the form of mood boards, storyboards, interactive prototypes, design specifications, and production assets.
• Generate multiple concepts that fulfill product scenarios and present in the context of informal and formal reviews. Use data and best practices to advocate a strong point of view, while being open to feedback from other stakeholders.
• Create and maintain design standards, reference materials and style guides.
• Help drive schedule and direction for motion design deliverables, working with other designers to ensure quality and timeliness are met.
• Work closely with developers to ensure implementation adheres to design specifications and to resolve situations when technical capabilities and design needs do not align.
• Bring thought leadership within and outside of the UX team in the form of collaboration, feedback, mentoring, and an advocacy for user-centric design.

What you need

• A strong portfolio demonstrating a diversity of experience and strong system-level thinking. It should cover the breadth of your design process, from ideation through to the final design, and clearly state your individual contribution to the project/product.
• BS/BA or Associates degree in graphic design, user interface design or equivalent.
• Industry experience covering a diverse range of products and platforms; consumer product experience is highly desired. You bring first-hand knowledge of what it takes to ship a product to market.
• An ability to think in visual systems patterns and styles that will create a unity in product experience while supporting a strong, clean visual identity.
• Equal passion and aptitude for contributing at the strategic level as well as the at the hands-on, detailed level.
• Exceptional graphic/visual design capabilities including typography, sketching, composition, layout, colour, iconography, and the presentation of information.
• Excellent communication skills. Must be able to communicate your ideas at all stages of the design process to a wide variety of audiences, understanding how to balance a strong point of view with an empathy for other perspectives and constraints.
• Strong understanding of user-centered design practices. Curiosity and a desire to understand the end user is a must.
• Passion for emerging technologies and a hunger to innovate.
• Strong, demonstrated proficiency in a variety of design tools such as Sketch, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Flinto, Invision, etc.

Bonus points for

• Experience working in an Agile development environment.
• Experience in interaction design and/or motion graphics, including UX transitions and animations.
• Ability to create interactive design prototypes in Axure, Flash, AfterEffects, Maya, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, or other tools.

Feel like you can’t tick all the boxes above? If you have some of the skills and experience that we’re looking for and are willing to use your talent to learn the rest, we encourage you to apply!

Why Thalmic

Day-to-day, we challenge each other to constantly raise the bar, encourage unconventional thinking to achieve innovative breakthroughs, and are passionately committed to surpassing our goals. We advocate a healthy lifestyle and promote continuous learning in a flexible work environment. Most of all, we set visionary goals, and we’re passionate about building the best, most impactful products that people will love.

About us

Thalmic is a hardware + software company building exciting technologies that will shape the future of human-computer interaction, backed by a world-class team of investors including Intel Capital, Spark Capital and The Amazon Alexa Fund.

We announced our first product, the Myo gesture control armband, in 2013, and pre-sold over 10,000 units in the first 48 hours. Myo is now shipping worldwide and has gone on to win numerous awards, including Digital Trends’ “Best of CES 2014” Award for Cool Tech.

Apply online here.

May 2017: This is not a talk about alt text

Often discussions about IT accessibility focus on how markup, such as alt text, can be added by developers to enhance accessibility. While good markup is important, it won’t ensure your interfaces are truly inclusive. In today’s presentation, Janna Cameron will share different approach, a design-centered, outside-in way to make truly exceptional experiences for people with disabilities. She’ll bring in examples from popular web applications.

Janna is a Senior Designer at the Manulife RED lab. Janna has been working in the UX accessibility field for 10 years — and has spoken about the subject in numerous venues, including for the US National Federation of the Blind Web Accessibility Training Day, the Canadian Marketing Association and EASI.

Please register for this free event

Thursday May 18, 2017
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Communitech Hub, 2nd floor
[View on Google Maps]

April 2017: Designing for a billion Gmail users

In February 2016, Google announced that Gmail, its cloud-based email service, now serves one billion monthly active users. With use-cases ranging from business to consumer, across various countries and platforms, Gmail is designed and built to provide reliable, secure communication so its users can be more productive and collaborative.

In this talk, Kylie Poppen will share personal lessons and anecdotes learned as a result of designing for those billion. Kylie is an interaction designer on Gmail, focusing on mobile clients and security features. Previously she was an interaction designer and frontend developer at bebop where she worked on building complex enterprise applications. Kylie earned a bachelor’s degree in Symbolic Systems with a focus in Human-Computer Interaction from Stanford University.

Note that we’re meeting on a Tuesday this month!

Please register for this free event

Tuesday April 25, 2017
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Communitech Hub, 2nd floor
[View on Google Maps]