Specialist, User Experience

If you're passionate about helping a Fortune 100 company drive their strategy forward through innovative product development and advancing strategic partnerships to protect customers (and their pets), then Nationwide's Strategy and Corporate Development Office might be the place for you!

Nationwide UX is seeking a talented visual designer to join our growing team and help realize our vision of becoming the most trusted, most caring and most customer-focused protection company. This role supports Retirement Solutions product design.

You'll join a team of 80+ multi-disciplinary professionals that includes interaction designers, information architects, visual designers, generative and evaluative researchers, content strategists, UI Engineers, and experience strategists. We proudly come from a variety of backgrounds - human factors, cultural anthropology, industrial design, and product design to name a few, and some you might expect less like journalism, genetic engineering, and young start-ups. What we share is a passion for human-centered design and solving real-world problems in ways that align with Nationwide's strategic objectives.

As a visual designer, you will be responsible for ideation and execution across a wide range of projects and platforms including many aspects of digital user interface design and brand experience. Preferably, your skillset includes design for mobile and responsive web.

You should have a good understanding of the digital landscape and a solid grasp of UX best practices as well as the possibilities and limitations of technology. Stronger candidates will have direct experience designing for enterprise level applications or comparable complex systems, as well as familiarity with a human-centered design process and crafting solutions based on user insights.

Your role will involve a high level of collaboration with others, including leads, researchers, writers, product managers, developers, and more across multiple lines of business, so you must possess strong communication and organization skills. You will present work to peers and stakeholders and build productive relationships. You should enjoy participating in design workshops, brainstorming, and other idea-generating sessions, as well as supporting development teams with the deliverables required to build and ship successful products.

You will be expected to think strategically and tell engaging stories. You will be able to guide your team and partners toward the right solutions by forming compelling and informed arguments. You will help evangelize a chosen design direction, recognizing which battles to fight and the appropriate opportunities to push boundaries. This means you're able to work within given business constraints and can ensure alignment of execution to business goals while producing user-centered results.

Over the last several years, Nationwide has made a commitment to invest in customer-centric solutions. We are expanding our team and have opened a new 31,000 square-foot innovation center in Columbus's downtown Arena District. It's an exciting time where Design has a seat at the table, and you can play a key role in helping us drive a return on this investment.

Job Description Summary
Do you shine in at least one core user experience (UX) competency? We have a passion for creating exceptional experiences that have a real impact on people's live and futures. If you understand the value UX provides in achieving strategic objectives and can articulate that value to cross-functional teams and business partners, we want to know more about you!

As a Specialist in the User Experience organization, in addition to expertise in one core strength (experience strategy, research, information architecture, interaction design, interface design, front-end development, content strategy or design operations), you'll need to demonstrate a thorough grasp of a couple others. It'll be important to have an understanding of the design process and ability to work in the ambiguous discovery phase of identifying the right problem to tackle and the details of delivering desirable products. You'll also have opportunities to work on project teams to distill complex problems into clear solutions that exemplify standard methodologies and encourage others. You will need to be adept at articulating and defending design decisions in a way that can be understood.

Job Description

Key Responsibilities:

• Provides creative, technical and strategic input and results to project teams.
  
• Collaborates with partners, product managers, technologists, UX peers and others across the company on technical and creative direction.
  
• Advocates for empathetic human-centered design and helps mitigate risks by pursuing work based on insights and an understanding of our users.
  
• Problem solves, thinks big and explores divergent ideas while understanding how to converge and build iteratively towards the best solution.
  
• Participates in idea-generating sessions and helps capture and evaluate ideas with respect to technical feasibility, business viability and human desirability.
  
• Able to think strategically and connect work to a larger picture.
  

May perform other responsibilities as assigned.

Reporting Relationships: Reports to Manager/Director. This is an individual contributor role.

Typical Skills and Experiences:

Education: Undergraduate studies in UX, human-computer interaction, psychology, graphic design, information science, communications or related field preferred.

Experience: Typically, three or more years professionally practicing some aspect of human-centered design.

Knowledge, Abilities and Skills: Good verbal and written communication skills. Comfortable explaining design rationale to other parts of the business. Basic understanding of UX principles and the human-centered design process. Ability to partner with multiple partner groups and tell compelling narratives. Owns work with some manager oversight. Independently and proactively seeks out answers as needed. Proven ability to analyze qualitative and quantitative information and external factors that may influence or have an impact on the company, as well as the customers, distribution systems, operations and strategy. Proven ability to set work priorities that conform with established objectives, timeframes and accomplish a task in the most effective manner. Ability to work with cross-functional teams.

Other criteria, including leadership skills, competencies and experiences may take precedence.

Staffing exceptions to the above must be approved by the hiring manager's leader and HR Business Partner.

Values: Regularly and consistently demonstrates the Nationwide Values.

Job Conditions:

Overtime Eligibility: Exempt (Not Eligible)

Working Conditions: Normal Office Environment. Extended work hours may be necessary during heavier volume work periods. Travel required as necessary.

ADA: The above statements cover what are generally believed to be principal and essential functions of this job. Specific circumstances may allow or require some people assigned to the job to perform a somewhat different combination of duties.
#marketing