Product Designer (Temporary)

University of Washington•Seattle, WA

12h•$108,000 - $114,000•Hybrid

About The Position

As a UW employee, you have a unique opportunity to change lives on our campuses, in our state and around the world. UW employees offer their boundless energy, creative problem-solving skills, and dedication to build stronger minds and a healthier world. UW faculty and staff also enjoy outstanding benefits, professional growth opportunities and unique resources in an environment noted for diversity, intellectual excitement, artistic pursuits, and natural beauty. UW's Office of Research Information Services (ORIS) has an outstanding opportunity open for a Temporary Product Designer. The Product Designer is responsible for contributing user-centered experience design to the Office of Research’s software portfolio. This role is involved from formative research and ideation through high-fidelity design, user testing, and post-release evaluation. A broad base of human-centered design skills inform the Product Designer’s deep understanding of user and business needs. This role helps to ensure products are useful and usable, bringing simplicity and clarity to administration in the University‘s complex, world-leading research enterprise. The Product Designer serves as a voice of the user and an advocate for user-centered design, helping ensure that systems used throughout the research lifecycle support effective, efficient, and accessible administration of research projects. This role complements other designers, business analysts, product managers, and back-, front-, and data engineers on the Product team. Beyond the Product team, Product Designers collaborate closely with data analysts, communications, and customer experience. It is essential for this role to be motivated by the challenge of the research administration domain, which requires Product staff to absorb large bodies of information about process, policy, compliance, and formal guidance. The role interacts frequently with users from business and administrative units throughout the University. The Product Designer asks good questions and approaches problems with a detail-oriented, practical curiosity. The role collaborates with others to craft and execute effective, concise UX Research plans to address product risks with actionable insights. Within a particular product scope, the Product Designer then synthesizes findings with information from multiple other sources, translating insights into clear design artifacts and specifications. Individuals in this role must be able to communicate design concepts in a wide range of methods and choose the appropriate medium in any given situation. This position has a direct impact on the University’s research mission by reducing the burden of administration required to prepare, submit, and manage research projects. It enables a fast pace of high-demand improvements to systems used throughout the research lifecycle, especially improvements to ORIS system integrations with Workday. By bringing a user-centered perspective to complex research administration systems and collaborating across the Product team and partner units, the Product Designer helps create more understandable, efficient tools for the University’s research community, supporting the success and competitiveness of the institution’s world-leading research enterprise.

Requirements

Bachelor’s Degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Human Centered Design & Engineering, Informatics, Psychology, or related field; or equivalent combination of education and experience.
Minimum 3 years of progressively responsible experience in UX design and/or UX research for web or application products, including experience working on cross-functional agile teams.
Experience facilitating user sessions, such as formative interviews, observation or contextual inquiry, card sorts, evaluative interviews, usability testing, co-design sessions.
Demonstrated competence with survey design; ability to write unbiased questions and match response data to appropriate analytical methods.
Broad working knowledge of user-centered design processes and tools; ability to select appropriate techniques based on product goals and constraints.
Demonstrated ability to translate complex requirements, policies, and workflows into clear design artifacts (e.g., flows, wireframes, prototypes).
Experience designing for responsive web experiences; sufficient understanding of front-end technologies (e.g. HTML5, CSS, Javascript) to collaborate effectively with engineers and incorporate their feedback.
Strong skill facilitating collaboration and communicating complex ideas clearly to technical and non-technical audiences through visual, verbal, and written means.
Strong online portfolio or body of work demonstrating user-centered process, design or research craft, and impact on shipped products or services.

Nice To Haves

Experience with technology for research administration, higher education, sponsored public sector projects, budgeting and financial management, or similar complex domains.
Experience integrating web analytics and other behavioral data into UX decision-making.
Ability to independently perform quantitative data analysis at the intermediate level to answer product and user research questions (e.g. MySQL, Python, Excel, PowerBI).
Demonstrated skill in UX research planning, including choosing appropriate study and analysis methods, responding to product development constraints, and scoping research activities to most effectively meet pressing needs.
Experience working with and presenting to strategic leadership.
High degree of comfort with skillful execution in prototyping tools (e.g. Figma), with the ability to quickly generate useful proof-of-concept prototypes from sketches and ideation.
Familiarity with agile software development practices (e.g., Scrum, Kanban); experience contributing to iterative release cycles.
Knowledge of accessibility guidelines and inclusive design practices; experience integrating them into designs.
Experience designing for mobile and multi-device experiences; familiarity with responsive and adaptive design patterns.
Experience contributing to or maintaining design systems, UI component libraries, or pattern libraries.

Responsibilities

Drive full-cycle product design activities for assigned products and features, from discovery through detailed interaction design and post-release testing.
Conduct user experience research (e.g. user interviews, surveys, usability testing, focus groups) in an agile product development environment to support timely, user-responsive design.
Write clear, comprehensible UX research reports describing activities conducted, analysis, findings, and design recommendations.
Collaborate with analysts and senior designers to leverage quantitative data (e.g. web analytics, surveys, support trends) to inform design decisions and to help define, monitor, and refine UX success measures.
Partner with product managers and business analysts to synthesize research, analytics, and stakeholder input into clearly scoped features and user stories that reflect user needs, policy requirements, and product strategy.
Create design artifacts to support shared understanding and decision-making (e.g. user journeys, information architectures, user flow diagrams, storyboards).
Build prototypes within an existing design system in Figma to communicate new interactions and test functionality with users.
Refine prototypes at the appropriate fidelity to support the given project goals and release timeline; contribute suggestions for future consideration to a backlog of enhancement ideas.
Apply best practices for accessibility defined in existing design system to design specifications, ensuring all solutions developed are usable by people with a wide range of abilities.
Demo prototypes to business stakeholders, soliciting feedback without bias, facilitating helpful and on-topic discussion, and generating actionable findings.
Participate in generative design critique sessions with other Product Designers; actively solicit and incorporate feedback to improve designs; and contribute well-informed, actionable critical feedback to others’ work.
Collaborate with front-end developers, facilitating working sessions and refining designs with feedback about feasibility and cost-effectiveness; design effectively within existing product constraints.
Contribute to product specification documents to support implementation, including user story acceptance criteria and well-defined design specifications.
Lead interaction and visual design for assigned products, translating complex workflows, policies, and data into detailed, interactive Figma prototypes.
Define and maintain information architectures, navigation structures, and content hierarchies that support efficient, learnable task completion across research lifecycle activities.
Collaborate with the Senior Product Designer to expand and refine the ORIS design system — including layout, typography, color, iconography, micro-interactions, and data visualization patterns — ensuring alignment with prior guidelines and optimization for accessibility.
Conduct heuristic evaluations of existing interfaces to identify usability issues, inconsistencies, and opportunities for simplification, and translate findings into prioritized design improvements.
Lead primary user research activities, including defining research questions, selecting appropriate methods, designing studies, recruiting and scheduling participants, and moderating sessions.
Analyze qualitative and quantitative data—including but not limited to interviews, observations, surveys, and analytics—using appropriate qualitative-coding, synthesis, and statistical techniques to generate clear, rich insights.
Partner with Customer Experience and analytics teams to identify and implement mechanisms for ongoing data collection; incorporate support trends and usage patterns into research and design.
Maintain the ORIS UX Research repository, helping set best practice standards for plans, notes, recordings, and findings; promote broad use of insights across products and teams
Educate and coach cross-functional colleagues in lightweight research methods so that teams can independently run small-scale studies while maintaining quality and ethical standards.
Build and maintain strong working relationships with business partners, stakeholder groups, product user groups and ORIS colleagues by facilitating regular touchpoints and maintaining transparency on design decisions, trade-offs, and timelines.
Design and facilitate collaborative workshops—such as discovery sessions, co-design activities, and prioritization exercises—to foster shared understanding of user needs and co-create solutions.
Present design concepts, research findings, and recommendations to diverse audiences, tailoring communication style and level of detail to stakeholders ranging from end users to senior leaders.
Partner with product, BA, and CX teams to create effective communications, demos, and training materials that help campus end-users understand and adopt new features and workflows.
Serve as an advocate and advisor to business units and project teams, helping them articulate user problems and opportunities, and aligning proposed solutions with the broader ORIS product strategy and design vision.
Contribute to continuous improvement of UX and product development processes, tools, and practices within ORIS, including participating in communities of practice and cross-team initiatives.
Perform other related responsibilities as needed to support the success of ORIS products, teams, and campus research stakeholders.
Keep abreast of emerging trends in product, design, and technology; learn about and introduce suggestions for new ways of working (e.g. AI/agentic design, new methodologies, personal areas of product interest)