Job: Senior User Experience Designer at NetSuite

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 location. 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’ll work with cross-functional teams of designers, developers & product managers to build a new vitality into our set of Financial products. Using a combination of best practice and innovation, you’ll help our team create a strong, best-in-class experience for our global customers.

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 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.
• 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: 17000ETV

March 2017: Engaging people with dementia

As a growing number of technologies emerge to help people with dementia maintain their independence and quality of life, there’s an increasing opportunity to give people with dementia a voice in the development of technologies intended for their use.

Join Jennifer Krul, of Emmetros, to learn how they approach user research when developing technology that makes it easier for people with dementia to speak for themselves. Jennifer and her team are fully committed to including and engaging people with dementia and their care partners in many aspects of our business, including product design, testing, and commercialization.

Engaging people with dementia matters to Jennifer and her team. They’ve partnered with Applied Health Sciences (AHS) and the Murray Alzheimer Research and Education Program (MAREP) at the University of Waterloo and the Ontario Dementia Advisory Group (ODAG) on a research project exploring best practices for engaging people with dementia in design, testing, and commercialization of technology intended for their use.

Today, Jennifer shares what they’ve learned.

Please register for this free event

Thursday March 16, 2017
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Communitech Hub, 2nd floor
[View on Google Maps]

February 2017: How FreshBooks persuaded its customers to accept radical change

Change can be hard. Join Aaron Wright and Jeff Kraemer as they take us on a journey of change at Freshbooks:

At FreshBooks, we realized that we had to reinvent our 10-year-old product; it was inflexible, and riddled with tech- and UX-debt. But we had a problem: our customers generally loved the old product. So, we designed and built a new product in stealth. We tested and iterated every week for almost two years, until we had a product we believed our customers would love.

But how to get them to switch? Most companies just push users to “upgrade,” but the new product had fewer features—isn’t that a downgrade? Lots of companies force users to change, but we heard loud and clear that our customers needed to be in control. And we’re determined to give our users extraordinary experiences, so what’s an extraordinary “change” experience?

This is the story of how we learned just how much our customers hate change, and how we persuaded them to change anyways. We’ll go into detail on how we tackled this as a design problem, starting with phone call interviews in which we simply told them a new FreshBooks was coming, and listened. Then, onto a technique from the Lean Startup framework called the “Concierge MVP” that gave us cheap and early insight into how our customers would react. You’ll also hear about our Lean UX process, which gives our designers a way to pilot and test radical changes, validate them with our customers through usability testing, and iterate from their findings.

About the presenters

Aaron Wright stumbled into the field of UX while pursuing a degree in Graphic Design at York University. Originally just trying hone his web design and app-building skills, he soon learned that there was, in fact, an entire field devoted to the study of user experience itself and immediately changed focus. And hasn’t looked back. Now a UX Designer at FreshBooks since 2012, he’s livin’ the dream of taming complexity and trying to make boring work (like accounting) as close to fun as humanly possible.

Jeff Kraemer ran his first usability test back in 2001; this was before screen-recording software, so recording the test meant pointing a VHS videocamera at the screen. Since then, he’s spent time specializing in content strategy and instructional design, but he really loves being a UX generalist. Previously at Workopolis and Usability Matters, Jeff is now Principal UX Designer at FreshBooks.

Please register for this free event

Thursday February 16, 2017
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Communitech Hub, 3rd floor theatre
[View on Google Maps]

January 2017: Researching the Kano Model

In a fast-paced agile environment, UX professionals often pull from their well-established toolbox of tried and true methods and practices to quickly and effectively solve user problems. However, it is sometimes necessary to seek out alternative methods which satisfy the unique needs of a particular project. In this month’s session, Erin Steed and Tony Bergstrom of D2l share their experience with the Kano model.

The Kano model, a customer satisfaction model created by a Japanese academic, is used to identify the delighters, must-haves and less relevant aspects of a user’s experience with a design. To evaluate the Kano model as an effective tool for an upcoming project, the product design team at D2L tested it with a feature-rich prototype which already had significant qualitative feedback. Through experimentation and iteration, the model proved useful by quantifying qualitative results, validating individual features and informing business decisions.

Tony and Erin will discuss why D2L chose to investigate this model, explain how the data is compiled and provide insights into lessons learned along the way.

Erin Steed is a user experience designer with degrees in psychology and adult education, as well as a diploma in graphic design. As Senior Product Designer at D2L, she applies her interest in user research and passion for the design process by creating delightful and intuitive experiences for educators and learners.

Tony Bergstrom is a Senior User Researcher with graduate degrees in Computer Science focusing on Human-Computer interaction. Working at D2L, he spends time finding ways to investigates questions and provides insight into user expectations. He favors approaches that balance both qualitative and quantitative feedback because it demonstrates more clearly what people do and what people think.

Please register for this free event

Thursday January 19, 2017
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Communitech Hub, 3rd floor theatre
[View on Google Maps]