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Director, User Experience & Design for Personals, Yahoo!
Mar 17 05
Source: direct submission
Company: Yahoo!
URL: http://personals.yahoo.com
Location: Sunnyvale, CA
Position Title: Director, User Experience & Design for Personals
Duration: Full Time
Job Description:
Yahoo! Personals, the leading online dating service, is seeking a Director of User Experience & Design. The Design team’s charter is to define and design the user experience for Yahoo! Personals, recently ranked as the #1 user experience in the online dating industry. Yahoo! Personals provides a combination of free and for-pay services to millions of singles seeking to connect with one another for anything from weekend activities to life-long companionship. You will be responsible for managing a team of passionate interaction and visual designers who work closely with design researchers and front-end engineers.
You will provide strategic product design and user experience direction to the Design and Product teams. You will work with Marketing, Engineering, Business Operations, and Customer Care teams to deliver the experience strategy for Personals products and services. You will oversee individual contributors for major product initiatives and direct and shape the user experience of both large- and small-scale projects.
At Yahoo!, you will be a leader in one of the largest and most established User Experience groups in the industry; collaborating and sharing your knowledge with the over 100 staff of interaction designers, visual designers and design researchers supporting the products and services on the yahoo.com website.
Primary Responsibilities:
Product Strategy and Design
- Improve visual, functional, and conceptual consistency across products and components.
- Apply best practices in user-centered design for the Personals family of products, resulting in high quality user experiences
- Define priorities and design schedule; allocate resources as appropriate for multiple projects.
- Oversee projects running concurrently on multiple tracks from planning through launch
- Coordinate the activities of the Personals UED team with other key departments, ensuring accurate and highly professional communications, coordination, and collaboration at all times.
- Oversee the development of design guidelines and their consistent deployment across Personals and the Yahoo network.
- Ensure successful knowledge sharing among both Personals and other user experience design teams.
- Partner with design researchers to develop research strategies and incorporate results from ethnographic, prototype, and usability studies into experience design
- Partner with product management and business unit leaders to define product strategy, product definition, and user experience.
- Partner with Engineering to develop new interface conventions and code libraries to ensure consistent and efficient deployment of design.
Brand Experience Strategy
- Understand the needs of internal and external customers, the business, and the competitive landscape. Translate this understanding into a vision and strategic plan for research and design to meet the needs of Personals and fulfillment of the Yahoo brand promise.
- Partner with Brand Marketing on brand architecture, promotions and branding treatments in products.
Managing
- Be a great people manager who can lead, inspire, and direct the activities of people within and outside the organization. Get buy-in at all levels.
- Teach, mentor and manage interaction and visual designers; write performance reviews; determine compensation and career growth.
- Effectively manage shared resource schedules for optimum productivity and efficiency
- Ensure high performance of the organization by clearly defining team member responsibilities, empowering team members to fulfill their responsibilities and supporting their efforts to do so, tracking progress and providing feedback, holding team members responsible for meeting agreed-upon goals, while demonstrating flexibility to address changing circumstances, and recognizing above-standard performances.
Education and Experience
- Proactive customer oriented individual with strong desire to innovate and develop great product designs.
- Extensive experience defining and developing free and for-pay consumer facing web applications at all stages of the product lifecycle.
- Must communicate clearly and effectively; strong analytical and oral communication skills; excellent interpersonal and leadership skills; able to collaborate actively with others in a cross-functional team.
- Strong matrix management skills
- Demonstrate strong design process and skills
- Highly organized and able to switch rapidly between different projects in a fast-paced and exciting environment.
- At least 5 years experience leading a large web site design effort with other designers and/or managing a design team
- At least 10-15 years' experience in product design, visual design, interaction design, Human Factors, HCI, industrial design, or related area
- Excellent grasp of the competitive and economic dimensions of the Personals space desirable.
- MBA/MFA desirable
About Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is a leading provider of comprehensive online products and services to consumers and businesses worldwide. Yahoo! is the No. 1 Internet brand globally and the most trafficked Internet destination worldwide. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Yahoo!'s global network includes 25 world properties and is available in 13 languages. Come and join our family of over 7000 Yahoos! in this exciting role.
Contact Information:
Send your resume and portfolio link to
RX0400005701 in the subject heading of your email.