[JOBs] Interaction designers, Midtown Manhattan IXD studio

Interaction designers – $70-130k – Midtown Manhattan IXD studio

Hello everyone,

We’re very happy and proud to be able to talk to you about one of our favourite design studios, who are looking to add some new interaction designers to the family in their brand new NYC home. We are working with these guys exclusively, so you will only hear about these roles through us.

What do they make:

This studio represents something fairly unique in NYC; a product and service design outfit with UX at the very core. Everything they do is user centered, from inception to delivery. Every project they undertake is disruptive in some way, whether the multi-award winning client work they undertake for global multinationals, or their own self funded product IP for distribution and release themselves (of which they invest over $1,000,000 a year into developing). They are extremely selective over the projects they undertake. The driving principle behind the work they do is that they want all the family to be proud of the things they work on, and the work that leaves the studio. They have had a historic focus on application and experience design outside of the web space (tablet, mobile, kiosk and touchscreen, product and interface), but will also work on web products as part of a larger piece of service or experience design.

How do they make it:

The production process in the studio is rigidly user centered, but also flexible and malleable enough to accommodate multiple project structures and client needs. Everything will begin with an extensive discovery phase, which will be a combination of interviews and collaborative workshops, contextual enquiries and ethnographic studies, a mix of qual and quants research tasks. From here, personas and scenarios will be visualized, stories and narratives created, initial journeys and flows concepted, data hierarchies and relationships will begin to be mapped out. From here, design concepting will begin; sketching, white boarding, paper prototyping, lo-fi wireframing, whatever makes sense. Actual wireframing is kept to a minimum where possible, in favour of building quick prototypes (or ‘live wireframing’ an experimental technique this studio has been perfecting over the last year). Clients will be brought into the creative process as much as possible, and the team structure on projects will include interaction designers, researchers, visual and GUI designers, front end devs and creative technologists, all working hand in hand throughout.

What are they looking for:

As a studio, they look for people with a creative specialism (data visualization, interaction design, research), masters of their field, but also with an appreciation of the other elements of the creative process. So if you’re an interaction designer with a background in visual design, or a UX designer with a good grasp of front end coding, or a researcher with an interest in communication design, you’ll fit right in. But this is not a restriction; you will naturally osmose skills outside of your field just by working in the way these guys work.

These guys have over 150 people across two studios in Europe (London headquarters), and 10 in their brand new NYC studio (midtown Manhattan), so this is a great opportunity to join an exciting new venture for an already successful studio, and help shape their proposition in North America.