Senior UX/UI Designer

Mission Overview & Responsibilities:

The Games team of The New York Times — the group behind Wordle, Spelling Bee, the daily crossword, and more — is looking for a Senior UX/UI Product Designer to focus on new game demos, betas, launches and improvements.

As a Senior UX/UI Designer, you will work within a cross-functional team to design, prototype, and improve game experiences with different levels of fidelity throughout all phases of the game launch process, focused on apps. You will create high-quality designs for complex game features, you'll use your craft and product thinking skills to bring clarity, sophistication, and playful experiences to our audience. You'll attend regular design rituals where you'll receive and provide critique, and identify opportunities for consistency across the function. You’ll also partner with research to validate concepts and usability and improve gameplay.

The Games team is based in our NYC Times Square office. This is a remote-friendly role and reports to the Product Design Director of Games.

Responsibilities:

You will partner with game designers, engineers, producers, and product management to bring new game ideas and products through all phases of the green light process. You will bring your expertise on user experience, interaction design, high quality visual design, UI design, app design, and knowledge of usability principles and techniques throughout the prototyping process to:

• Enhance demos and concepts by creating clear UX, providing satisfying feedback, and designing refined, beautiful UI, resulting in fun, user-friendly games.
• Create high-quality, production-ready designs and collaborate with engineers for seamless implementation
• Partner with user researchers and data analysts to identify pain points, develop research-backed hypotheses, and surface opportunities for improvement, using both quantitative data and qualitative research to inform design decisions.
• Support high-level game strategy from a visual design and UX perspective, ensuring we're asking the right questions and solving for distinct needs.
• Demonstrate support and understanding of our value of journalistic independence and a strong commitment to our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world.

Basic Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience in product design and UX for digital games.
• A portfolio of work that showcases your design process along with finished design work.
• Proficient in gameplay affordances, with expertise in creating clear, satisfying, and delightful UI/UX, and an understanding of what makes digital experiences engaging, fun, and repeatable.
• Experience working with low-fidelity designs and creating detailed, production-ready work in later project phases.
• Experience designing high fidelity UI assets.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in app design.
• Experience in a product design/UX role working on social play component games.
• Experience documenting and delivering UI screens and specifications to engineers.
• Experience working with less defined constraints and across varying levels of project completion.

REQ-017045

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