UX Designer
MO Studio
Posted 2 years ago
Who We Are
Founded in 2016, MO Studio helps government leaders achieve their mission by designing intuitive and sustainable customer experiences that build trust and improve satisfaction. We use human-centered design to modernize and transform customer and employee experiences. We’re a small team of interdisciplinary creatives with mission, impact, and service to others deeply rooted in our DNA. We’re naive enough to believe we can change the world and bold enough to take the chance to do it.
We combine design thinking with agile delivery methods to drive visionary, human-centered products to market. Our custom solutions range in size from completely revamping an entire application to refreshing small pieces of a larger product. Everyone at MO Studio directly impacts the direction and success of the company, and we own our roles. We value integrity, curiosity, and courage, and we operate collaboratively and with accountability while consistently challenging each other in the pursuit of excellence. At MO Studio, we delight in creating one-of-a-kind products and experiences, your imagination is the only limit on what you can do here!
The Work
Are you looking to make an impact? We have partnered with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the largest health care system in the nation and the second-largest in the world, to modernize the Veterans' digital health experience. We're going to build the essential, integrated, and seamless user experience to improve access to care and health outcomes for 19 million Veterans. If you empathize and understand what an end-user wants and you've developed wireframes from scratch through whiteboarding, paper prototyping, and collaborative online wireframing tools - please read on.
MO Studio is growing, and we're looking for creative talent with a growth mindset who can jump right in and make seemingly unrelated connections across products and experiences. You have an up-to-date understanding of best practices, developments and trends in UX design, and enjoy interacting with the development team. You care deeply about human-centered design and about making the customer experience great.
What You'll Do
- Participate in the design process, integrating the needs of the user, the business, and the team to deliver impactful products.
- Provide input into the strategizing, planning, and designing activities and experiments for research and testing.
- Synthesize research into insights, opportunities, service design artifacts, and changes to prototypes.
- Present concepts and finished work to the product team and customer for feedback in biweekly demos.
- Design, coordinate, and facilitate co-creation workshops with cross functional stakeholders.
- Use constraints across the three lenses (desirability, viability, and feasibility) to inform design decisions.
- Develop conceptual sketches, proof of concept design, prototypes, MVPs, etc. at different levels of fidelity (e.g., hand sketches, wireframes, clickable prototypes).
- Translate designs into use cases, user stories, etc. and feed into the product backlog.
- Work within the design system and identify opportunities for improvements.
- Design and test information architecture of customer facing products with end users.
- Provide input into an integrated product roadmap.
- Illustrate concepts and workflows with service design artifacts.
- Participate in the development of processes and products that enable Section 508 and HIPAA Compliance across the experience.
- Influence product teams to identify and prioritize work; attend bi-weekly backlog prioritization meetings, sprint planning, daily standups, demos, retros, etc.
- Use data in the design and decision-making process and define measurements.
- Deliver the right level of detail for design specifications to support implementation.
- Use modern research, design, and dev tool stack (e.g., Slack, Mural, Sketch, FunRetro, Jira, GitHub, GitLab).
- Foster a transparent environment that uncovers risks, develops mitigation strategies, removes blockers, and creatively finds ways around barriers.
- Contribute to visual design decisions using practices outlined in the U.S. Digital Services Playbook and VA Content Style Guide.
Hard Skills
- Our guiding principle is that if you're excited about our mission, vision, and values and you think you'd be a great fit, please apply - checking every box is not a requirement.
- Experience collaborating with multiple partners, defining the product, the challenge, and the process leading teams to a solution.
- Strong sense of ownership, with matching capability to problem-solve and delegate.
- Strong communication skills with the ability to collaborate with stakeholders and client teams.
- Experience developing processes and products that enable Section 508 Compliance across the experience.
- An unyielding commitment to enable the standards in the Digital Solutions Playbook and VA Content Style Guide.
- Experience with or understanding of design thinking, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Scrum, or other Agile Methodologies.
- Strong portfolio illustrating design skills highlighting UX design, service design, and/or IA.
- Bachelor of Design, Information Architecture, HCI, or equivalent project/portfolio experience.
Your Emotional Intelligence Quotient
- You’re relentlessly curious, eager to grow, and never satisfied with ‘easy’.
- You’re a gifted leader and creative who sees the world not from an “I” point of view but from a “we” perspective.
- You have creative courage when tasked with opportunities and challenges.
- You thrive in complex ecosystems and are proactive when faced with limited direction.
- You practice radical candor and view feedback as a gift.
- You’re passionate about working on and solving big problems.
- You ask questions, find answers, and understand how to distill a vision into a solution.
- You have high expectations of yourself and your team.
- You’re a customer advocate and human-centered design evangelist.
Location and Travel
- Our team is currently located in every time zone across the U.S. VA's HQ is based in Washington, DC, and MO's official HQ is in Denver, CO. Our company was born hybrid, so the location for this role is flexible.
- Since our work necessitates collaboration, expect 10-25% travel once we're through the pandemic.
- To enable a geographically separated team, you'll be utilizing a modern tool stack to collaborate with teams spread across time zones.
Making an Impact on Complex LandscapesOur customers' ecosystems are compliance-driven, multi-stakeholder environments. Successful members of our team understand how to be innovative within this environment, know the importance of relationships, and are able to creatively influence change.
Setting the Stage to Enable GrowthWe're a small but rapidly growing company with big aspirations, limited resources, and a design mindset. We make meaningful steps to improving ourselves every day, but we are constantly ruthlessly prioritizing our own focus. We don't have much red tape, but we don't have some of the things people expect of a large company—clear roles and responsibilities, well-defined processes, training, etc.; expect to be asked to wear more than one hat and help us design and implement these things as we scale.
Diversity of ThoughtWe are committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. We are an equal opportunity employer. All aspects of employment, including the decision to hire, promote, discipline, or discharge, will be based on merit, competence, performance, and business needs—and we pride ourselves in the investment we make in our people. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.