Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Creative UX/UI Designer

💰 $ - $

DesignProductUXUI

🎯 Role Definition

The Creative UX/UI Designer is a product-focused designer responsible for shaping intuitive, accessible, and visually compelling digital experiences across web and mobile platforms. Working closely with Product Managers, Engineers, Researchers, and Marketing, this role owns end-to-end interaction design: discovery and user research, information architecture, wireframes and prototypes, visual design and motion, design systems, and engineering handoff. The ideal candidate blends human-centered design, visual creativity, and practical engineering awareness to deliver measurable improvements in user engagement, conversion, and satisfaction.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior UX/UI Designer or Associate Product Designer
  • Visual / Graphic Designer transitioning to product design
  • Interaction Designer or UX Researcher

Advancement To:

  • Senior UX/UI Designer / Product Designer
  • Lead Product Designer or Design Lead
  • Design Manager / Head of UX
  • Principal or Staff Designer (cross-functional strategic role)

Lateral Moves:

  • UX Researcher
  • Product Manager
  • Front‑end Engineer (React/Vue) with a UI focus

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead end-to-end UX and UI design projects from discovery through launch, translating business goals and user needs into wireframes, interactive prototypes, and pixel‑perfect high‑fidelity visual designs for web and mobile.
  • Conduct user research activities including stakeholder interviews, contextual inquiry, diary studies, and moderated/unmoderated usability testing to validate design hypotheses and inform product decisions.
  • Synthesize user insights and analytics data (heatmaps, funnels, session replay) into actionable design requirements and measurable success criteria for A/B testing and optimization.
  • Create comprehensive information architectures, user flows, task flows, and sitemap documentation to clarify navigation, content hierarchy, and cross‑platform consistency.
  • Develop wireframes, mid‑ and high‑fidelity mockups, and interactive prototypes using Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD to communicate interaction patterns and design intent to stakeholders and engineers.
  • Build, maintain, and scale a design system including component libraries, tokens, layout grids, accessibility guidelines, and usage documentation to ensure consistent UI and faster delivery.
  • Collaborate closely with product managers to define scope, prioritize features, write design briefs, and align on success metrics and launch plans.
  • Partner with engineering teams to ensure accurate handoff of assets, responsive implementation, and QA verification; provide redlines, specs, and CSS/HTML guidance where necessary.
  • Advocate for inclusive design and accessibility (WCAG 2.1/3.0) across products, performing accessibility audits and recommending remediation for screen reader compatibility, keyboard navigation, and color contrast.
  • Translate complex user needs and business requirements into elegant, scalable interaction patterns and UI components that reduce cognitive load and improve task efficiency.
  • Drive customer-facing experiments (A/B tests, multivariate tests) by designing test variants, measuring impact on conversion, and iterating based on results.
  • Lead cross-functional design reviews and critique sessions to gather feedback, align on trade-offs, and iterate rapidly while retaining design integrity and business focus.
  • Create and present design proposals, journey maps, and storytelling artifacts to executives and product stakeholders to gain alignment and secure resources.
  • Own the mobile-first and responsive design approach; create adaptive layouts, breakpoints, and component behaviors for varying screen sizes and device capabilities.
  • Implement motion design and microinteractions to enhance feedback, affordances, and perceived performance while maintaining accessibility and performance budgets.
  • Mentor junior designers and interns: conduct portfolio reviews, pair design sessions, and provide constructive feedback that promotes best practices and career growth.
  • Maintain a deep understanding of competitors, industry design patterns, and emerging UI/UX trends; recommend innovations that deliver differentiated user value.
  • Define and monitor UX KPIs (task success rate, time-on-task, Net Promoter Score, conversion rate, retention) and iterate designs to improve those metrics.
  • Facilitate discovery workshops, design sprints, and ideation sessions with stakeholders and engineers to accelerate alignment and prototype validation.
  • Manage multiple concurrent design initiatives, balancing speed and quality while meeting product delivery timelines in an Agile environment.
  • Document design decisions, trade-offs, and rationale to create institutional knowledge and simplify future iterations or handoffs.
  • Ensure brand consistency across product touchpoints by applying brand systems, tone of voice, and visual language in UI components and marketing integrations.
  • Collaborate with marketing and growth teams on landing pages, email templates, and paid acquisition creative to ensure continuity between marketing and product experiences.
  • Conduct post-launch usability reviews and retrospectives, capturing learnings and backlog items to continuously refine the product UX.

Secondary Functions

  • Support cross-team initiatives such as onboarding flows, accessibility remediation sprints, and internal tooling UX improvements.
  • Help define product design metrics and dashboards that track UX health and signal areas for redesign or optimization.
  • Contribute to hiring: review portfolios, conduct interviews, and participate in design hiring calibration to grow the design team.
  • Maintain and organize the design repository, component library, and documentation site for fast designer and developer onboarding.
  • Provide on-call design support for high-priority incidents involving UI regressions or live experiments.
  • Produce marketing-ready assets and guidelines to maintain visual coherence between the product UI and external communications.
  • Assist product analytics and research teams with hypothesis formulation and user segmentation for targeted studies.
  • Run regular design QA sessions with engineering to ensure implementation fidelity and timely remediation of visual bugs.
  • Facilitate knowledge-sharing sessions and internal workshops to raise design literacy across product, engineering, and customer-success teams.
  • Partner with legal and privacy teams to ensure UI design complies with regulatory and data privacy requirements (GDPR, CCPA) where applicable.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • User Research & Usability Testing: planning, recruiting, moderating, synthesizing qualitative and quantitative findings to inform design decisions.
  • Interaction Design & Information Architecture: creating flows, sitemaps, and task models that optimize user journeys and reduce friction.
  • Wireframing & Prototyping: rapid low‑ to high‑fidelity prototyping with Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, InVision, or Framer for realistic user testing and stakeholder demos.
  • Visual & Interface Design: strong typographic, compositional, and layout skills; ability to produce high‑fidelity UI mocks and design polished visual systems.
  • Design Systems & Component Libraries: creation and governance of reusable UI components, style tokens, documentation, and version control.
  • Accessibility (a11y): practical knowledge of WCAG standards, semantic HTML, ARIA roles, keyboard navigation, and color contrast best practices.
  • Responsive & Mobile Design: designing adaptive layouts, breakpoints, and gestures for iOS and Android as well as multiple desktop widths.
  • Front-end Familiarity: working knowledge of HTML, CSS, responsive frameworks, and component-based libraries (React/Vue) to collaborate effectively with engineers.
  • Motion & Microinteraction Design: use of motion principles and prototyping tools (Principle, After Effects, Lottie) to enhance usability.
  • Analytics & Experimentation: familiarity with Google Analytics, Amplitude, Mixpanel, Optimizely, or VWO to interpret behavior and support A/B experimentation.
  • Information Design & Content Strategy: structuring content, microcopy, and CTAs that guide users and drive measurable outcomes.
  • Version Control & Collaboration Tools: Figma/Abstract/versioning workflows, Jira/Trello/Asana for tracking work, and Slack for cross-functional communication.

Soft Skills

  • User empathy: strong ability to understand and articulate user needs and pain points.
  • Communication: clear storytelling and presentation skills to convey design rationale to non-design stakeholders and executives.
  • Collaboration: proven record working in cross-functional Agile teams with PMs, engineers, researchers, and marketing.
  • Problem solving: analytical mindset to break down complex problems into testable designs and measurable hypotheses.
  • Prioritization & Time Management: managing multiple projects while delivering high-quality outputs on tight timelines.
  • Feedback receptivity: openness to critique and ability to iterate quickly based on data and stakeholder input.
  • Leadership & Mentorship: coaching junior designers and fostering a collaborative design culture.
  • Strategic thinking: balancing short-term delivery with long-term product design vision and systemization.
  • Negotiation & Influence: ability to advocate for UX decisions and negotiate scope trade-offs with product and engineering.
  • Attention to detail: obsession for quality in spacing, alignment, states, and interactive behavior.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Interaction Design, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Graphic Design, Visual Communication, Computer Science, Psychology, or related field; or equivalent practical experience and portfolio.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in HCI, Design, or related discipline, or completion of recognized UX/UI bootcamps and certifications (Nielsen Norman Group, Interaction Design Foundation, Google UX Certificate).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Interaction Design / Product Design
  • Human‑Computer Interaction (HCI)
  • Graphic Design / Visual Communication
  • Computer Science / Front‑end Development
  • Psychology / Cognitive Science
  • Information Architecture / Content Strategy

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–6 years of hands-on UX/UI/product design experience for web and mobile platforms (mid to senior level). Candidates for senior or lead roles may have 5–10+ years.

Preferred:

  • Demonstrable portfolio of shipped consumer or B2B digital products showing full lifecycle design (research → prototype → launch).
  • Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments and collaborating closely with engineers and product managers.
  • Track record of building or contributing to design systems, running usability studies, and improving key product metrics (conversion, retention, NPS).
  • Prior experience with accessibility compliance, A/B testing, and integrating analytics into the design process.
Explore More Careers