Principal Designer

The McDonalds Global Design team is a key part of the Customer Experience team (MCX), which provides user-centered experiences that deliver a cohesive and meaningful experience for customers and crew members around the world.

The position requires demonstrable expertise in solutions with strong design work, UX research, design sensibility, and articulate storytelling. This is a hands-on role focused on both product discovery and design deliverables. The position involves participating in the entire design lifecycle, but with a focus on blue-sky, boundary-pushing concepts, UI, visual and interaction design. The Principal Designer will play a key part in elevating the standard of design within the organization and ensuring overall alignment and consistency across Product areas. The ideal candidate will be comfortable with ambiguity, passionate about design, and able to lead large initiatives with minimal direction.

Responsibilities:

Your attention to detail is renowned, your design and research skills impeccable, and you love putting structure around difficult problems. You thrive on being hands-on and immersive. You look for opportunities to improve the way things work. Your superpower is the ability to make connections across various products to establish a seamless customer experience across all channels.

· Be an excellent leader and practitioner giving guidance to design simple, engaging, and intuitive experiences in both web and native/hybrid ecosystems thinking through the physical aspect of an Omnichannel experience

· Be the catalyst to push innovative design concepts based on a deep understanding of user needs and business objectives; willingness to try new innovative approaches and iterate

· Understand technical, business, and time limitations and design within these constraints

· Lead throughout the entire design process by designing experiences that infuse empathy and creativity that will also inspire and serve as guidance for all other disciplines to deliver towards

· Execute on user research and usability tests and ensure the findings are incorporated into design decisions

· Obtain buy-in from stakeholders, explaining how design solutions addresses the identify problem/ user need

· Lead complex, multidisciplinary projects from start to finish

· Balance near term execution and far-term strategic investigations by being a forward looking, innovative thinker that will define north star (ideal) experiences

· Communicate the value of design within a design and business context, and identify the critical design trade-offs to deliver value-add solutions

· A solid grasp of user-centered design (UCD), human computer interaction, planning and conducting user research, user testing, rapid prototyping, heuristic analysis, usability and accessibility concerns

· Part of a multi-disciplinary discovery squad, you will be working to uncover opportunities for product development, identifying, quantifying the value and validating potential solutions with customers

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree preferred in a related field (HCI, UX Design, Product Design)

· 10+ years of hands-on experience in digital design (browser + app at minimum)

· Expert in Figma

· Expertise across all facets of human-centered design and user experience, spanning UX strategy, experience/interaction design, user research, prototyping, and visual design, but UI, visual and interaction design superpowers

· Experience translating qualitative and quantitative data into design decisions

· Experience with designing experiences for consumer applications and/or enterprise experiences

· Solid understanding of experience design principles and best practices

· Flexibility and openness to feedback from cross-functional team members

· Strong prioritization, planning and time management skills

· Attention to detail and follow through

· Excellent verbal and written communication skills; superior at relationship-building

· Ability to think fast and slow and know when to do each

· Portfolio or equivalent asset containing examples of digital design solutions and your thought process, success and failures, getting to the outcome

· Well versed in facilitation techniques that enable groups to build clarity and alignment

· Proven ability to lead indirectly and influence without reporting lines

· Understanding of accessibility standards

Preferred:

· Understanding and knowledge of mobile human interface guidelines (Apple’s HIG and Google’s Material Design), current possibilities and limitations of hardware and operating systems

· Master’s degree in Human Factors, Interaction Design, Industrial Design, Graphic Design, or related technical field