POSITION SUMMARY
The Senior Experience Designer supports a vision for how experiences should be designed for a product or products through hands-on creation of new product concepts and capabilities. They possess advanced skills in interaction and visual design, in addition to some exposure to other key user experience skills.
They are heavily involved in the iterative process of concept development, prototyping, and gathering user and business feedback; and make product user experience decisions based on this feedback and key metrics. They produce, individually or collaboratively, innovative and impactful solutions for a product, and help maintain a shared vision across the enterprise to ensure a quality and cohesive user experience.
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EXPECTED CONTRIBUTIONS
In the course of your work with Marriott’s digital products, including Marriott.com — one of the top 10 revenue-generating web sites in the world — you’ll come in every day ready to tackle interesting, challenging work. Here’s what you’ll be doing:
* Working collaboratively with your manager to develop the experience design practice, promoting best practices and user-centered design approaches that align with the Marriott culture and needs
* Acting as an advocate for UX design standards and guidelines, supporting the extended team in developing and maintaining this foundation for designing cohesive experiences
* Championing the creation and iteration of design strategies that help Marriott Digital Products leadership visualize a long-term organizational direction
* Working on one or more product lines, where your decisions will align with high-level organizational strategies, KPIs, and business objectives, while working with other team leaders to translate these into team and personal goals
* Staying on top of the latest techniques being used by our direct competitors and other eCommerce sites, and identify strategic opportunities for competitive advantages through benchmarking, consumer insight, market analysis, and other techniques.
* Valuing data over opinion, by basing decisions on site metrics and user research findings and insights, observing users interact with our product or a competitor’s for at least two hours every six weeks
* Promoting a culture where critique and feedback are central to the work we do, and ensuring that team members have regular opportunities to critique and have work critiqued
* Critiquing your own behavior to acknowledge mistakes and improve future leadership performance, and acting independently to improve and increase skills and knowledge
* Staying focused on continuously improving and re-evaluating best business and user experience practices
* Valuing emotional safety, keeping team members focused on celebrating failures and highlighting lessons learned from those failures
* Keeping co-workers grounded on the idea that our focus is on delivery rather than deliverables, and solutions rather than documents
* Working in a collaborative environment with people who have a variety of skills — like user experience design, research, product management and front/back-end development — collectively contributing to the end product.
Work Environment
You’ll work with a variety of cross-functional teams, each practicing design in various product development settings. These include Agile’s fast-paced, iterative product discovery and execution; a waterfall that supports large, complex projects where you’ll keep track of many challenges and collaborating to solve multi-faceted problems with other teams; and to a lesser extent, marketing in a more traditional, client-agency model with faster turn-arounds, and limited resources and support.
CANDIDATE PROFILE – KEY TALENTS AND EXPERIENCE DESIRED
Marriott International | Job Specification: Senior Experience Designer 2
Candidate Profile
You’re exactly who we’re looking for if you:
* Value deadlines, set realistic expectations around them and then meet them
* Can balance user, business and technical needs, and will go to bat for users if things are out of kilter
* Help teams define a product’s problem areas from our most important users’ perspective
* Thrive on creating innovative solutions to challenging user and business problems
* Understand the blurry line between skills, and use collaboration as the best way to deal with it
* Have a current understanding of web technologies and principles— like responsive design, front-end markup and libraries such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery and Ajax methods, plus Content Management Systems, Web Services, and APIs—and know how they’re integrated and used
* Have superior communication and interpersonal skills, including strong facilitation, presentation, storytelling, sketching and critiquing skills
* Can establish successful long-term relationships in your core areas and influence others
* Inspire confidence and lead through example
* Feel comfortable with basic statistics and analysis, and can use data to inform your decisions
* Are proficient with spreadsheets (MS Excel) for multiple uses, from content inventories to budget management and staff forecasting
Skills
Our ideal candidate has all of these skills. If you’re missing one, but are passionate about learning new things, we still want to talk with you.
Interaction Design
You’re a master of advanced techniques of interaction design, and can’t wait to wow us with a portfolio that shows it. Also:
* You design how systems respond to the actions of users, with the goal of optimizing the satisfaction of those users’ specific goals
* You can think through an interaction and communicate it to potential users, your team and stakeholders through sketches, wireframes or prototypes
* You can see all of the edge cases an interaction may spawn, but balance this through judicious use of the 80/20 rule
* You have strong awareness of common interaction patterns used by competitors and the general industry, and know how to apply them
* You're comfortable working with standards and guidelines for interactions and components, but also creative in coming up with new ones when necessary
Graphic Design
You’re a master of basic techniques of graphic design, and can walk us through a portfolio that shows it.
* You structure visual elements as a way to satisfy the specific goals of well-defined users
* You use contrast, color, tone and proximity of elements to help users move through information, functionality and interactions
* You educate non-designers about how your design solutions address the user goals specific to the project, aligning your tactics with the product’s driving strategies
* You simplify the volume and interplay of visual elements, bringing clarity without sacrificing the power of visual design
Prototyping
You’re a master of basic techniques of this skill, and can walk us through a portfolio that shows it.
Information Architecture
You’re still mastering the basic techniques of information architecture, but you understand what’s involved, and can collaborate with others who have more experience in the skill.
Education and Experience
Our ideal candidate has experience working on large transactional e-commerce and content-focused web sites. They have at least a Bachelor’s Degree in Experience or Interaction Design, Graphic Design, Information Architecture, Library Sciences, Human Factors, Psychology, Anthropology, Branding or Marketing (or similar), or five or more years of equivalent experience in related field with proven track record, and:
Audience Diversity
Marriott International | Job Specification: Senior Experience Designer 3
You get that people are different. You’ve led the delivery of successful products and communications targeted to diverse, heterogeneous user groups with complex or competing needs based on race, national origin, religion, age, disability or gender expression. And you can walk us through a portfolio that shows it.
* You can articulate the distinguishing characteristics between segments of an audience in a way that is relevant for design activity to act upon
* You have observed differences in expectations, needs and behaviors that audiences from different cultural backgrounds express, and you are able to distinguish cultural stereotypes from truly distinct needs
* You have observed differences in expectations, needs and behaviors that individuals in different generational profiles express, and you are able to weed out stereotypical ageist assumptions/noise
* You have worked on products and communications serving niche audiences, and can articulate what attributes make such audiences unique
Branding
You’re the brand master. You’ve applied advanced techniques of this skill and can walk us through a portfolio that shows it.
* You have experience working with national and global brands
* You’ve launched, revitalized and differentiated brands online
* You’ve ensured that brand expression is cohesive across various digital touch points
* You’ve worked with major consumer brands and know how to support/differentiate them in the digital space
* You’ve promoted a complete portfolio of brands
* You’ve balanced the needs of the brand and the needs of the user and recognize the impact of the brand experience on the user experience
* The same brand can vary across different markets. You understand how to give it voice on the local level.
* You know how and where to simultaneously maximize brand impacts and user experience across the user’s digital journey
Responsive Web Design
You understand the web. You embrace the unpredictability of what it takes to design digital experiences amid a digital renaissance of electronics brought on by a new wave of device variety and availability worldwide. Also:
* You are comfortable discussing a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience for users across a wide range of browser viewports, agnostic to device capability
* You can explain the meaning of browser viewports, media queries, responsive images, fluid grids, relative units, progressive enhancement/graceful degradation, Mobile First, and Content First
* You are intrigued and curious by how unresolved topics in the context of responsive web design are being addressed and actively pursue information to understand how nascent standards are emerging/taking shape
* You can discuss UI patterns and their pros/cons depending on context of use, especially those contexts in which mobile and tablet devices are heavily used
* You are comfortable working with devices you have not used before and exploring how your design solution performs within the device’s capabilities/constraints
Standards & Practices
You understand the need for a shared vocabulary among collaborators. You advocate the notion that providing agreed upon knowledge and references for an organization are key to driving cohesive decisions.
Content Frameworks
You’re the master of content frameworks and are articulate in your understanding of them.
* You can provide requirements needed to update or extend the content framework
* You understand what content can be managed with a content framework
Product Pages
You are an expert at creating digital experiences that communicate product benefits and attributes using all types of content.
Search and Reservations/check-out
You’ve had extensive experience with and are a subject matter expert on online travel booking (preferred) or other eCommerce search and checkout processes.
*Marriott International is an equal opportunity employer committed to hiring a diverse workforce and sustaining an inclusive culture. Marriott International does not discriminate on the basis of disability, veteran status or any other basis protected under federal, state or local laws.* _Job:_ eCommerce
*Primary Location:* USA-MD-Bethesda-Marriott International HQ
*Organization:* Corporate
*Schedule:* Full-time
*Job Posting:* Mar 10, 2014, 12:12:08 PM
*Req ID:* 14000DIJ