UX Designer

We are looking for an UX Designer who is the advocate of the user within the development team, incorporating all aspects of user focused design considerations including information architecture, user centered design, user testing, interaction design, and even aspects of visual design.

You will be able to demonstrate UX expertise following Wolters Kluwer guidelines and market best practices. The role requires both broad and deep knowledge of human interaction, design patterns (on premise, web and mobile technology), and the ability to develop the best possible solution for the users and their context by mapping a customer's business problem to an end-to-end technology solution.

As an expert you should be able to work in depth for a specific project, providing advice and coaching to analysts and developers, as well as across projects, designing and building the UX process, keeping it aligned to the overall SDLC (and maintaining this as well).

Responsibilities
You are a team player and determined to meet the team's goals
You are able to cooperate closely with developers, technical architects, analysts, project management.
You are able to cooperate closely with product developers and business development.
User research and observation:
You are the go to person when it comes to user research and user observation (user interviews, observation, surveys, …) and you are able to use the right method for the right phase of the project. Traditional outcomes are a library of personas and customer journey maps (initiation phase), user testing, A/B testing, … (execution phase).
Wireframing and Mockups:
You are responsible for the quality of the designs in order to achieve the best possible quality. You guard the overall consistency of the user experience. For this you take the user's needs and goals into account.
You are able to think strategically and end-to-end for a complete user experience. You are able to identify and report potential gaps in the overall user experience to the respective stakeholders.
You are a sparring partner for the UX Lead and other team members when discussing design problems.

Personal and communication skills
You are an excellent and diplomatic communicator, both written and oral. You know how to convince people using a well founded rationale, and possess the skills to deal with different types of personalities.
You are at ease when meeting new people; within the Kluwer organization as well as outside of it, and are very capable of having them "open up" to you in order to gain the most insights in their thinking processes when using our software. You definitely know how to put them at ease.
You are able to quickly identify "problems of the user". This is true for problems where you can detect a possible business opportunity as well as for problems with the usability of a specific software.
You are a generalist but with the ability to switch quickly into a detail mode, and since you can go in and out of project, it is important for you to quickly grasp and understand the questions that dev-team brings up.
You know how to manage your workload and you can pro-actively calculate the time that is needed to get a certain task done.
You have a critical attitude toward business requirements and are able to provide constructive feedback to the business owners. You listen to the end users and map the proposed solutions to their issues and problems.
You aim for added value at all times.
You are able to cope with changing requirements and progressive insights
You are able to think outside the box and make abstraction of existing solutions, providing different angles to a problem

Technical skills & knowledge
You know how to design interaction and are able to work out mockups to support development:
Sketch, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Balsamiq

You understand how modern web and mobile app development works, although you don't code yourself. Understanding technical discussion concerning responsive design, grid systems like Bootstrap, CSS3, HTML5, icon web fonts, SVG's, etc. are a plus. You are familiar with the design patterns that are used for each type of development.
Experience with Scrum is an asset
Strong interest in UX experience, knowledge of UCD processes
Highly organized, detail-oriented, and ability to multi-task
Big picture-oriented and a strategic thinker with ability to identify and articulate emerging trends and opportunities
Exceptional interpersonal skills and ability to build good working relationships to work alongside technical, business, and other teams
Flexible and open to change
Ability to inspire and engage project team