03.01.2012

Sr User Experience Designer, HTC Innovation

Washington, U.S.

Location: Seattle, WA

About HTC:
HTC is one of the fastest growing companies in the mobile phone industry and a recognized pioneer in smartphones. Today, HTC continues to build on an already impressive list of innovations and industry firsts.

As the world leader in Windows Phone and Android based phones and the #3 smartphone maker in the US, HTC is building its market share by creating a widely recognized brand name and bringing a broad portfolio of products to market that are designed to meet the diverse needs of people.

The DROID Incredible by HTC, the HTC EVO 4G, MyTouch 4G, HTC Thunderbolt and HTC Inspire, just to name a few, have been received with widespread acclaim and only hint at what the future holds for HTC.

HTC Innovation:
Over the past 5 years, HTC's Innovation Team in Seattle has created the vision for HTC Sense, HTC's branded, cross-platform user experience. During that time, HTC has transformed from a device manufacturer into a global consumer brand. The Innovation Team provides design strategy for all of HTC, and collaborates directly with product teams in Taipei to bring new designs to market. We are a small team with the feel of a startup and the backing of a company with over $10 billion in annual sales.

Our process relies on the collaboration of exceptionally talented individuals within integrated cross-disciplinary teams to create products that offer functional benefits and emotional resonance to our target audiences.

Opportunity:
HTC’s Innovation Team is looking for a user experience designer with 5 or more years’ experience, who is driven by the desire to work as a team player, shows a talent for creating unique, yet relevant, design solutions, and is committed to HTC's success in the mobile device market.

Job responsibilities:

• Participate in user and market research to understand the needs and desires of our target audience.
• Develop scenarios and storyboards to communicate design concepts to team members, product groups, and executives.
• Synthesize external design input and feature requests.
• Design, build, and test interactive prototypes to iterate and evolve your design concepts.
• Deliver detailed information architecture, interaction and visual design specifications to product teams.
• Investigate, kick off, and evangelize design initiatives based on design research.
• Present and evangelize design concepts to internal and executive teams.
• Accurately judge level of effort for individual/team design contributions.
• Manage design process, project schedule, and relationships with HTC's engineering and marketing groups in Taipei.
• Track design related issues.
• Contribute to an evolving design culture and process at HTC's UX Design team group and throughout HTC's worldwide design organization.

The successful candidate will have:

• 5+ years of interaction design experience, including significant non-Web interaction design work.
• Experience shipping multiple products from concept to creation.
• Experience working with and influencing a multi-disciplinary team of UX designers/researchers, planners, engineers, business development, product planning, and sales.
• Experience in designing both hardware and software user interfaces (mobile device interaction design experience is a major plus).
• The visual design skills to produce professional-quality interaction design concepts and specifications. You need not be a graphic designer per se, but the quality of the design of your deliverables must be commensurate with the high caliber of the content.
• BA/BS in Interaction Design, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Computer-related Design, HCI, Human Factors, or closely-related field (masters degree is a plus).
• Expertise in the major graphics tools (Illustrator, Photoshop, and Visio/Omnigraffle) and at least one prototyping tool.
• Strong project management and communications skills and willingness to be a team player.

We should get to know each other if you:

• Are thrilled by the chance to ship new products of your own design to millions of passionate HTC users.
• Live for cross-disciplinary user-centered design, but would rather design products than discuss process.
• Obsess about creating design solutions that offer both functional and emotional benefits.
• See design as both a cultural and strategic activity.
• Are happy to travel quarterly to Taipei, Taiwan to collaborate with product groups.

Free agents with both corporate and consulting backgrounds are highly appreciated.