Experience Designer

Employment Type: Open to full-time or contract work

Location: Negotiable within the U.S. We are open to remote work from various locations within the U.S., preferably in Eastern or Central time zones. 

We are committed to creating a diverse workforce which is why we have invested in a third-party blind recruiting solution that removes personal identifiers from CVs & cover letters. Candidates from diverse backgrounds are strongly encouraged to apply. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, marital status, age, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Salary: We will consider applicants for Experience Designer and Senior Experience Designer commensurate with experience. Range across these positions is $90,000 - $110,000.

About Echo&Co:

Echo&Co is a unique human-centered creative and technology firm, dedicated to doing good in the world.  We have a clear vision to be an inclusive team of talented people who want to come, stay, and do their best work. 

Echo&Co helps impactful organizations and social ventures create inspiring human journeys, the digital platforms to enable them, and the internal capacity to improve them over time. This requires us to lead client teams with complex stakeholder landscapes through substantial organizational transformation. Our work is richly challenging and uncommonly rewarding. Echo&Co is a certified B Corp dedicated to advancing social and environmental benefit through our work. Promoting equity and inclusion is reflected in our core values and our team, who are equally passionate about their creative disciplines, doing good in the world, and building a community where everyone has access to the same opportunities and feels respected and valued. This is the foundation of our company and community, and extends to each team member, with utmost respect for individual experiences and contributions across race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, national origin, and/or ability.

You can learn more at echo.co/about-us.

About This Role:

The Experience Designer is a very important role at Echo&Co. The Experience Designer takes the best practices from the fields of visual design and user experience and applies it to the context of social, cultural, and environmental good, helping social sector organizations — nonprofits, foundations, social ventures — strengthen their relationships with constituents, attract new activists, donors, and supporters, and increase their digital literacy and sophistication. 

The Experience Designer at Echo&Co contributes to a thriving and growing user experience and visual design practice at Echo&Co, shaping and delivering excellent work in collaboration with team members and clients. The Experience Designer is an important team member who helps develop an engaged, thriving, and equitable community for all Echo&Co team members, who respects the contributions of each person and sees them as important co-creators of that community.

The Experience Designer must have experience leading creative phases of client engagements and working within a professional services firm through all stages of delivery, from gathering requirements and prioritizing business goals, to designing and presenting user interfaces and visual designs. The Experience Designer also must have knowledge of how to define, scope, and manage the completion of work in partnership with other disciplines and team members.

The Experience Designer is a full-time position that reports to the Director, Experience Design.

This requires:

• Developing concepts for features and functionality and documenting their visual direction in user or screen flow diagrams, wireframes, creative briefs, and visual page mockups.
• Leading client engagements through the user experience and visual design phase, being a champion for using great user experience and visual design to improve brand perception and engagement.
• Building strong, collaborative, honest relationships with your colleagues and clients, focusing on setting shared vision and goals, open communication and collaboration, and directly resolving uncertainty or conflict. Readily engaging colleagues and clients in conversations that manage expectations, lead change, and open possibilities for new collaboration.
• Advocating passionately for the needs and wants of users, while also tactfully balancing organizational and technology constraints; using user advocacy as an important tool for advancing organizational change with clients.
• Grounding your design work in observation, research, and analytics, and clearly communicating that basis for your design decisions in order to help clients reach consensus.
• Facilitating brainstorming and sketching exercises for ideation to drive and determine the direction for designs; using client working sessions as opportunities to mentor clients in improving their knowledge and expertise in user experience and visual design.
• Being active in the user experience and visual design professional fields and having a keen awareness of industry best practices and trends.

Responsibilities:

• Be a confident and innovative designer and leader, able to set and drive a vision for how to apply user experience and visual design as a powerful force for good.
• Connect your passion for doing good in the world with your vision for doing great user experience and visual design, inspiring both Echo&Co teams and clients with both.
• Collaborating closely with the strategy, content, and technology teams in the creation and documentation of requirements, product roadmaps, sitemaps, prototypes, and CMS specifications.
• Achieve more with less, using lean principles to guide the development of great work while conserving scope, which is particularly important when working with nonprofit clients.
• Be observant, strategic, and maintain an open mindset, learning from engagements and adapting readily to the needs they present, while maintaining stability in scope and timelines.
• See risk and change as opportunities to deepen the relationship and trust with clients, and readily engage teams and clients in conversations that manage expectations, lead change, and open possibilities for new collaboration.
• Be interested, engaged, and effective at helping clients overcome all user experience and visual design challenges presented, no matter how big or small, recognizing that small challenges met well often open the door for much larger strategic engagements.
• Present effectively both internally and to clients. Explain design choices, and address issues and concerns; help partners reach consensus.
• Participate on project teams as a subject matter expert on user experience and visual design, collaborating closely with the project manager, software architects, content strategists, and other team members.
• Assist in setting and meeting expectations with project teams, including clients, project managers, developers, and designers, while driving profitability by fulfilling monthly billable utilization targets.
• Support in developing quality assurance processes to ensure that all experience practice-specific deliverables meet the firm’s standards for excellence. 
• Must be active in the user experience or visual design professional field and have an understanding of industry best practices and trends; attend seminars, conferences and workshops (as appropriate) to learn new UX and visual design techniques, and expand knowledge to apply to experience design.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of design and documentation experience for complex web and mobile interfaces and interactive projects within an agency environment, with a focus in requirements analysis, specification development, user experience and visual design, and implementation.
• Bachelor’s degree in marketing, communication, psychology, business, library science, graphic design, or a related field. Master’s degree in a related field a plus.
• Have confidence in and enjoy presenting design to and incorporating feedback from stakeholders at differing levels of expertise and levels within an organization.
• Strong influencing, negotiation, and communication skills.
• The ideal candidate will possess strong technical acumen, ideally with understanding of digital content publishing architecture, development principles, and web technologies.
• Must be a dynamic team leader, strong communicator, and proactive decision-maker within a fast-paced environment. 
• Ability to think strategically and work both collaboratively, as well as independently. 
• Ability to think of design as a system and design modular features and functionality that work seamlessly across a user interface when configured in different ways.
• Possess excellent user experience, strategic thinking, and analytical skills, and be able to provide leadership and strategic direction to account teams and the firm as a whole.
• Be trustworthy and sincere, with a “roll up your sleeves” work style.
• Ability to organize and manage multiple priorities effectively.
• Ability to analyze and resolve problems at both strategic and tactical (functional) levels.
• Understanding of internet technology and web development processes.
• Understanding of advocacy and engagement strategies and best practices.
• Understanding of accessibility best practices in user experience and visual design, particularly accessibility on the web as set by standards organizations such as the WCAG.
• Must have a social good orientation with an interest in working for mission-driven clients, including progressive nonprofit organizations, socially responsible enterprises, government agencies, and multinational institutions that seek to make positive change.
• Must thrive in an environment that promotes change, embraces innovation, and runs on teamwork.
• Willingness and availability to travel frequently for job-related activities.

Echo&Co is an equal opportunity employer, with a commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and anti-racism. 

All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.