Job: Visual Designer at D2L

Company: D2L
Location: Kitchener, Ontario or Winnipeg, Manitoba

What would I be doing in this role at D2L?

• You will be helping learners achieve their full potential. Think about the good you will do for the world!
• You will be researching, designing and influencing products that are going to have an impact on improving teaching and learning.
• You will make the products more usable and beautiful. You will work with layout, typography, color, and motion to guide users through the product and evoke an emotional response. You will push creative boundaries. You care about every pixel.
• You will work with an agile scrum team delivering mobile and web-based solutions that benefit learners, teachers, and those who support them.
• You will collaborate with our team of product designers—experts in visual design, interaction design, user research, accessibility, and front-end development. You will have an opportunity to share your expertise and be supported by other like-minded people. You will continually learn and look for ways to innovate.

What would my main duties be?

• Demonstrate a passion for our users. Participate in a variety of research activities to understand our users’ motivations, behaviours and unmet needs. Validate design ideas and respond to user feedback
• Iteratively design and specify the visuals for key parts of our mobile and web apps
• Rapidly prototype designs so that they can be demonstrated and tested
• Refine the composition and layout of key screens
• Create the detailed visuals elements and subtle animations that make our apps beautiful
• Be a champion for the brand within product development

What is D2L looking for from me?

Visual designers at D2L demonstrate excellence in:

• Layout
• Colour
• Typography
• Illustration
• Motion Graphics and Animation
• Adobe Creative Cloud
• HTML, CSS, JavaScript
• Mobile App Design

In addition, we like to see:

• A track record of delivering successful mobile and web application
• Experience working in an agile development team
• Good understanding of mobile and web technologies and an appetite for learning more
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills
• Degree in graphic design, digital media design, or related discipline

Ready to make a difference?

Contact Pete if you’d like to chat about the role – peter dot rothe at d2l dot com. Otherwise, apply online now.

Reference #: D2LVDWIN

Job: Product Designer at D2L

Company: D2L
Location: Kitchener, Ontario

What would I be doing in this role at D2L?

Whether you are an experienced interaction designer or a recent co-op graduate, we are looking for creative problem solvers to transform product requirements into highly functional user interfaces.

You will be designing and influencing products that are going to have an impact on improving teaching and learning. You have a good intuition for what makes an effective experience and a love for designing software to meet our clients’ goals and expectations.

You will collaborate with your team, usability specialists and other designers who will challenge you to create the most desirable software. Whether you are designing a web or mobile application, our designers are technically savvy and stay on top of the leading technologies they are designing for.

You will continually learn and look for ways to innovate. You thrive in an Agile development environment and culture where designers speak freely and collaborate to solve interesting problems. You take pride not just getting things done, but delivering the best.

What would my main duties be?

• Take product requirements and consolidate them into software workflows that meet user expectations
• Develop user stories, wireframes and high and low-fidelity prototypes to communicate a compelling design vision
• Collaborate with your development team, product owner and graphic designers to ensure feasibility of design concepts
• Conduct user research and focus groups by interacting with the community and internal stakeholders
• Proactively vet designs to ensure seamless user experience across the product suite

What is D2L looking for from me?

• Strong analytical, communication, facilitation, negotiation and interpersonal skills
• Experience taking a design from concept to software delivery
• Experience creating storyboards, wireframes, flow diagrams and interactive prototypes
• Strong visual design sense
• Understanding of Agile and other project methodologies
• Knowledge of user-experience design principles
• Graphic design skills are considered an asset
• Knowledge of accessibility principles is considered an asset

Ready to make a difference?

Contact Pete if you’d like to chat about the role – peter dot rothe at d2l dot com. Otherwise, apply online now.

Reference #: D2LCPD

May 2015: UX book club returns with Indi Young

Indi Young has become a bit of a UX celebrity around these parts. Her empathy workshop at the region’s premier UX conference, Fluxible, followed by a D2L sponsored lunch and learn left us all wanting more. So, we’ve decided to go get some more!

We’ve selected her latest book, Practical Empathy, as the topic for our May meeting. Anyone at all involved in developing a product needs to have a solid understanding of its users and empathy is a tool that can help develop that understanding. It’s a mindset that focuses on people, helping to reveal their thinking patterns and perspectives. The book focuses on how to gather and compare these patterns to make better decisions, improve your strategy, and collaborate successfully.

But wait — there’s more! We will discuss the book as a group for the first portion of the evening and then Indi will join us live from San Francisco for the last part. Come prepared with questions, or just come looking for answers.

There are many locations to buy this book, including Amazon.ca, or Rosenfeld Media. (Psst…if you came to Fluxible and *still* haven’t used your free ebook coupon for Rosenfeld Media, now’s a good time to redeem it!)

Hope to see all of you soon!

Thursday May 21st, 2015
7:00 to 8:30 pm
Boltmade Offices
Waterloo, Ontario

[View on Google Maps]

April 2015: Design for the Network

Important note: This event has been rescheduled to April 16. The time of day and location remain unchanged.

For our March April session we’re delighted to welcome past Fluxible speaker Matthew Milan back to Waterloo Region!

For thousands of years, networks have played a growing role in the progress of human society. They are the hardware infrastructure that the software of culture runs on. Design has always been about creating culture; what’s different now is that the target of design isn’t just a user, a group or a market. We’re designing for the network.

Proposing a new target for design means that we need a new language of design. We need to consider a new aesthetic, new materials, and new methods, methodologies and mindsets. Perhaps most importantly, we need to reflect on whether the future of design should continue to be human-centered.

This talk will delve into the role of design in our connected world of networks, software and systems. We’ll explore approaches and perspectives that can help us become more networked-centered in our work as designers, and challenge some core elements of current design practice by asking what it means to “design for the network”.

About Matthew Milan

Matthew is the Co-founder and CEO of Normative, a software design firm headquartered in Toronto. Matthew is a design leader with 15 years of experience in the domain of emerging technologies, specializing in software design, innovation and product development. A veteran of startups in the areas of knowledge management, geospatial visualization and machine learning, Matthew excels at helping collaborators turn complex ideas and information into compelling and engaging user experiences.

A recognized voice in the areas of design and strategy, Matthew speaks regularly at conferences on a wide range of topics including interaction design, systems theory and wearable computing.

Please RSVP for this free event

We manage our monthly events at Meetup.com. Join us there!

Thursday April 16, 2015
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Atlas/Matrix room
Communitech Hub
Kitchener, Ontario

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March 2015: Introduction to user story mapping

Note: As our original March event has been rescheduled to April, we’re now presenting this fine workshop event for March.

User story mapping has been described and demonstrated by Jeff Patton for years in workshops and, most recently, in his terrific book User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product. It’s a great a tool for helping software product development teams focus on users and their needs rather than on features.

In this session, uxWaterloo’s very own Mark Connolly will provide an introduction to Patton’s user story mapping through a straightforward hands-on workshop that focuses on the key concepts and enables everyone to create their first story map. Sounds like fun, right?

Thursday March 12, 2015
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Atlas/Matrix room
Communitech Hub
Kitchener, Ontario

[View on Google Maps]

Job: User Experience Designer at Sandvine

Company: Sandvine
Location: Waterloo, Ontario
Type: Full time

As a User Experience Designer you will be responsible for helping define the user experience for the next generation of Sandvine products.

You will be required to perform a broad range of UX activities, as needed to support various initiatives. Depending on the project this may involve the analysis of existing products, the design and/or redesign of our product user interfaces, planning and execution of field research and usability testing, as well as helping establish standards and guidelines. Additionally, you will collaborate with other team members in a challenging and fast-paced environment.

This position is Waterloo, Ontario.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a knowledgeable and passionate user advocate.
• Analyze products and proactively identify opportunities for improvements in the experience.
• Design intuitive, efficient and elegant experiences for our end users.
• Communicate design ideas and decisions effectively, ensuring that UX design has a strong voice.
• Plan and execute user research and usability tests.
• Establish standards and guidelines.
• Maintain awareness of current human-computer interaction and usability research, theories and methodologies.
• Collaborate with other contributors, including product management, engineering and the support and testing teams.

Qualifications

• Formal education in design, information science, psychology, social science, or equivalent work experience.
• *Deep* understanding of usability and user experience design principles, with a minimum of 5 years of experience.
• Minimum of 5 years of experience organizing and executing field studies and/or usability tests.

• Ability to produce various design artifacts as needed to support your activities: wireframes, mock-ups, task flow models, information maps, personas/user profiles, and/or prototypes. You are a proficient user of various wireframe, drawing or prototyping applications such as Axure, Fireworks, Photoshop, etc., or HTML, CSS & JavaScript.
• Capable of designing user experiences for various devices including desktop, tablet and mobile.
• Exposure to business or technical applications, intellectually curious, and able to learn about products that deal with complex subject matter.
• Awareness of web technology, and its capabilities and constraints.

As a person you are

• An articulate communicator, with excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Flexible and versatile, with the ability to jump into a broad range of UX activities.
• Self-motivated, able to balance the demands of multiple projects, and still get things done.

Apply for this position!

Job: Interaction Designer at Deloitte

Location: Kitchener-Waterloo @ Communitech Hub
Type: Full time

Role Description

We are currently seeking driven and qualified candidates to join our newly formed D{ } Lab (pronounced “D Space Lab”). D{ } is a new, dedicated prototyping lab located within the Communitech Hub, where you will be working alongside some of the brightest startup people within the Kitchener/Waterloo region. You will be part of a new, multi-disciplinary, high performance entrepreneurial team that designs and prototypes innovative solutions that solve complex business problems and helps launch new technology-based business opportunities.

The D{ } team is highly collaborative, focused on building and developing tangible, innovative solutions that are visionary as well as pragmatic. These solutions are software/hardware based and leverage the technologies and concepts in emerging spaces such as 3D printing, wearables, biometric authentication, and the Internet of things.

As an Interaction Designer, you will work with a small team of entrepreneurial-minded developers and co-op students in a unique startup environment. You will need to be curious and nimble explorer of new ideas. You will be asked to wear multiple hats, juggle multiple responsibilities, and apply your creative and technical skills to deliver engaging, innovative and beautiful prototypes for Deloitte and our customers. Leveraging state-of-the-art technologies, you will work on a variety of projects within small agile/scrum teams with a focus on prototypes, design, MVP implementation, and solution validation.

Qualifications

To qualify for our Interaction Designer position, you should possess the following:

• 5-10 years experience on diverse projects across the design lifecycle
• Minimum 3 years experience working on mobile-centric products
• Ability to lead a small team to deliver tangible results
• Ability to be a team-player and action-oriented
• Open-minded and self-driven
• Familiar with agile/scrum/lean UX and enjoy working in a dynamic environment
• Proficient in developing personas, detailed storyboards, mockups, and prototypes for communicating interaction, experiences, and interfaces
• Keen design sense mixed with an empathy for and attentiveness to customer feedback
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills
• Ideally, you have a degree that includes Design (including graphic, visual communications, product, and industrial design), Human-Computer Interaction, and Computer Science (or equivalent through work experience)

You have demonstrated expertise in:

• HTML5, Javascript, CSS, Illustrator, Photoshop, and OnScreen Prototyping Tools
• Information Architecture
• Concept Model Design
• Usability Testing
• Visual UI Development
• Programming skills a bonus

Next steps…

If this sounds like the right next move for you, apply online. If you have some questions, contact Norm Malloch by email at nmalloch at deloitte dot ca.

February 2015: Reasonable people shouldn’t use design thinking

Design Thinking is itself contradictory. It is not about designing and not limited to thinking; it is large and contains multitudes. It also won’t solve your big problem because the problem is, we don’t understand the problem.

Design Thinking provides a guided iterative process of addressing problems that are difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. The outcome sometimes addresses fundamental needs that your users didn’t know they had, which negates — rather than solves — the original big problem. Design thinkers sometimes are required to change reality to what they need it to be, before a solution can be found. This is not a process for reasonable people, as George Bernard Shaw observed: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him… The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself… All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

In this discussion, David Loop from SAP Canada tells two stories that illustrate how the problems we try to solve are not generally the right problems — and how Design Thinking can help guide us to success.

About the speaker

David Loop is a Senior Design Thinking coach and facilitator for SAP Canada. He has been assisting informatics, business, and industry teams in finding their insights and advancing to solutions. David brings a wealth of knowledge and varied experience to his talk with his past in knowledge management, software development, consulting, education and theatre

Please RSVP for this free event

We manage our monthly events at Meetup.com. Join us there!

Thursday February 19, 2015
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Atlas/Matrix room
Communitech Hub
Kitchener, Ontario

[View on Google Maps]

Job: UX Designer at Igloo Software

Location: Kitchener, Ontario

Igloo is an intranet you’ll actually like. It’s a web-based solution that enables you to share files, give updates, find answers, exchange ideas and work better together with your colleagues and customers.

We are looking for a senior UX Designer who fights for the user. You are passionate about personas, story boards, wireframes, and occasionally the back of a napkin. You understand that design and performance are not mutually exclusive and you know how to blend the two.

You will take ownership of the style guide and best practices that drive our designs, as well as enhancing them and driving their widespread implementation. You will ensure new features fit into the platform according to the standardized methodology and will tune existing features to be more coherent. You will question designs, prototypes and demos to ensure they live up to a high standard.

You’ll have multiple projects in various stages at any given time and you should be comfortable with switching tasks as priorities change.

You don’t have to know how to code, but you should understand the impact designs have on technical performance.

Key responsibilities:

• Conduct research to understand user needs and competitive landscape
• Collect and document business and functional requirements
• Translate complex ideas into clean user interface concepts
• Create user flows, wireframes, and other pieces of UX documentation
• Work with design and development teams to bring UX concepts to life
• Facilitate user testing and conduct interface analysis
• Provide ideas to “make it better”

Need to have:

• 3-year diploma or 4-year degree in design, computer science, or similar
• 2-4 years experience working in UX for web-based platforms
• Experience in user interface design or design for the web
• Strong creative research, writing, and design skills
• Strong attention to detail

Nice to have:

• Ability to write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• Experience with responsive design

How to apply:

Send your cover letter and resume (as one document), as well as portfolio (URL or PDF) to careers@igloosoftware.com.

Job: User Experience Designer at Dematic

Location: Waterloo, Ontario

Dematic is a global engineering company that provides a comprehensive range of intelligent warehouse logistics and materials handling solutions. With a global knowledge network of more than 4,000 skilled logistics professionals, Dematic is able to provide customers with a unique perspective in world-class materials handling solution design. Our commitment to solution development, combined with engineering centers and manufacturing plants in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, ensures Dematic has the range and capability to provide reliable, flexible, cost-effective solutions globally. Our successful track record has led to the development and implementation of more than 5,000 integrated systems for a customer base that includes small, medium, and large companies doing business in a variety of market sectors. Dematic generates a global business volume of approximately $1.3 billion.

The Global R&D Software Organization is responsible for delivering software products to support a wide range of conveyor and sortation solutions, warehouse automation, and distribution operations.

This is an exciting opportunity to join our software team in Waterloo, Ontario, and to establish a user-centered design approach for the Global Software organization. We are building an Analytics platform to help Dematic global customers optimize the performance and throughput of their warehouse and distribution systems. You will have hands-on responsibility for designing the user interface to provide rich data visualization, reporting, and data mining.

You must have a passion for championing the user through the development process, coming up with innovative ideas, and working collaboratively with other talented people to put those ideas into products.

Key Responsibilities

• Act as a user advocate throughout the software development process
• Develop intuitive screens allowing the user to visualize and understand complex data
• Work directly with customers and other stakeholders to understand user needs
• Help build a product that lets customers visualize and understand complex data and make decisions
• Create consistently high quality user interface mockups and walkthroughs for stakeholder reviews
• Perform usability testing and take a data-driven approach to optimizing user experience
• Work within a Scrum environment to plan and deliver incremental software in defined sprints
• Establish overall UI style guide for software, aligned with marketing and other stakeholders
• Develop a library of icons and other UI assets for global software products
• Build strong partnerships with software developers, business analysts and product managers
• Travel to other Dematic sites with some frequency (particularly in the first six months)

Qualifications

• Post-secondary education in human-computer interaction, design or related field
• Minimum of 3-4 years’ experience working on web-based product design
• Experience using standard wire framing, prototyping and design tools
• Knowledge of front-end web development including JavaScript, HTML and CSS
• Understanding of customer analytics and principles of data visualization and dashboards
• Strong analytical and problem solving skills with a high attention to detail
• Proven ability to work directly with customers to understand requirements and elicit feedback
• Ability to design and facilitate interviews, usability tests, and other research activities
• Exceptional ability to work with cross-functional teams to build partnerships and get things done
• A strong portfolio of mobile and web work for real products
• Experience working in an Agile Scrum environment to evolve product design over many iterations
• Knowledge of HTML/CSS is an asset
• A good sense of humor and an ability to have fun!

APPLY ONLINE