Product Designer

Job Title: Product Designer

Client: Microsoft

Location: Remote: Preferred in Vancouver, BC

Duration: 12 - 18 months

Req id: 153370-1

Contract on W2

Typical Day in the Role

• Purpose of the Team:

This role is for the Answer Card Framework Team (ACF), with a core focus centered on user experience and core building blocks, that could span multiple form-factors, devices and ecosystems. You will help to contribute to the execution of our Human Interface Guidelines (its documentation, maintenance and scaling for a very large base of existing and potential users), and the design of framework components of the search results page, all while driving design coherence of the product. You’ll be joining a set of designers, with whom you can partner, learn from, and contribute towards. You will be an integral part of the engineering team and will have the opportunity to partner closely with Program Managers and the Developers that are directly involved in creating and evolving user experiences.

An ideal candidate would have experience with simplifying complex user scenarios, and good knowledge in UI Patterns, Frameworks and scaling Design Systems. You are forward-thinking, passionate about improving our users experience, on top of current UX trends, and excited about exploring new possibilities and opportunities. You can quickly bring new ideas to life from low fidelity sketching to clickable prototypes. You can take big picture ideas and help translate them to ownable concepts with your design and storytelling skills. Most importantly, you love pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, crafting experiences that fulfill direct user need while also adding a sense of delight.

• Key projects:

→ Create high quality wireframes, mockups, and prototypes, in a timely and iterative environment.

→ Collaborate with multidisciplinary teams throughout all stages of design process to deliver useful and efficient end-to-end user experiences.

→ Scope and prioritize work across multiple projects and tasks.

→ Perform usability tests, working with end users and stakeholders to ensure problems and needs are understood.

→ Present work to teams

Candidate Requirements

• Years of Experience Required: 5-7 overall years of experience in the field.

• Degrees or certifications required:

• Disqualifiers:

□ Lack of Design System Experience: Candidates who have never worked on a design system before will be disqualified.

□ Insufficient Years of Experience: The number of years of experience matters, and candidates with insufficient experience will be disqualified.

□ Limited Platform Experience: Candidates who have only focused on either mobile or web-based platforms, but not both, will be disqualified.

□ Onsite Requirement: Although this role is remote, if it were to be hybrid or onsite, unwillingness to come into the office would be a disqualifier

• Best vs. Average:

→ Collaboration: The candidate should be collaborative and able to work effectively with other team members, including engineers and designers.

→ Detail-oriented: The candidate must pay attention to detail, ensuring that all aspects of the design system are meticulously documented and implemented.

→ Communication: The candidate should have strong communication skills to document guidelines clearly and provide patterns to partner design teams.

→ Patience and Openness to Feedback: The candidate should be patient and open to receiving and incorporating feedback.

→ Curiosity and Proactiveness: The candidate should be curious and proactive in finding areas of inconsistency or inefficiency and suggesting solutions.

→ Demonstrated knowledge in all things UX, including accessibility and systems.

→ Great eye for visual design and layout. Understanding of multiple modality design patterns and various form-factors.

→ Excellent understanding of UX methodologies and implementation of design patterns.

→ Excellent communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills

→ Strong organizational skills and an attention to detail.

→ Ability to quickly learn modern design tools such as Figma.

→ Systems Thinking; Thinks in terms of reusability and modularity, not just one-off screens or components. Anticipates edge cases and how changes in one component affect the broader system.

→ Advocacy & Enablement; Can evangelize and educate others about the design system. Experience running audits, onboarding designers to the system, or conducting trainings.

→ Curious and proactive — finds areas of inconsistency or inefficiency and suggests solutions.

• Performance Indicators: Performance will be assessed based on ability to work fast paced environment and quality of work.

Top 3 Hard Skills Required + Years of Experience

1. Minimum 5+ years experience with Design System Experience ( building, maintaining, or scaling a design system, including understanding component libraries, design tokens, and accessibility standards)

2. Minimum 5+ years experience with Collaboration with Engineers (candidate should be comfortable working with front-end developers to implement or refine components and have knowledge of how design translates into code)

3. Minimum 5+ years experience with Documentation & Communication ( clearly document guidelines, usage patterns, and provide patterns to partner design teams, ensuring the documentation is easy to understand )

4. Minimum 5+ years experience with Figma ( Highly skilled in using Figma, including Auto Layout, Variants, Components, Tokens, and Libraries ) and experience setting up scalable Figma libraries that are easy for other designers to use.

Hard Skills Assessments

• Expected Dates that Hard Skills Assessments will be scheduled: ASAP

• Hard Skills Assessment Process: The assessment process will include 2-3 rounds

Please let me know if this is something you would love to do, and help me with your updated resume. Feel free to reach me out at harshiv@ifgpr.com. if you have any questions.