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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for User Experience (UX) Specialist

💰 $ - $

DesignProductUser Experience

🎯 Role Definition

This role requires a User Experience (UX) professional who will drive user-centered design across web and mobile products. The ideal candidate partners with product managers, engineers, researchers, and stakeholders to define product direction, craft intuitive interaction models, and deliver measurable improvements to usability, engagement, and conversion. This role combines user research, interaction design, prototyping, and hands-on visual design to create cohesive experiences that scale across platforms and align with business goals.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior UX Designer / UX/UI Designer with 1–2 years of hands-on experience
  • Product Designer intern or Associate Interaction Designer
  • Visual Designer or Front-end Developer transitioning to UX

Advancement To:

  • Senior UX Designer / Senior Product Designer
  • Lead UX Designer / Design Lead
  • UX Manager, Head of UX, or Director of User Experience

Lateral Moves:

  • UX Researcher or Service Designer
  • Product Management (PM) with a user-centered focus
  • Design Systems Engineer or Front-end Engineer (with emphasis on component implementation)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Conduct end-to-end user research including contextual interviews, usability testing, surveys, diary studies, and remote moderated sessions to identify user needs, pain points, and behavioral patterns that directly inform product strategy and roadmap.
  • Translate qualitative and quantitative research insights into clear user personas, empathy maps, journey maps, and problem statements that can be adopted by product, engineering, and marketing teams.
  • Design and iterate high-fidelity interactive prototypes and wireframes for web and mobile using industry tools (e.g., Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD), validating interaction patterns and visual hierarchy before development.
  • Own the information architecture of product areas by defining site maps, navigation systems, content hierarchy, taxonomies, and cross-platform workflows to improve findability and task completion rates.
  • Lead moderated usability testing sessions and A/B experiments, synthesize results into actionable recommendations, and measure impact through metrics such as task success, time-on-task, conversion rate, and NPS.
  • Collaborate with product managers to shape product requirements and define acceptance criteria that prioritize user needs and reduce ambiguity for engineering teams.
  • Create and maintain design systems and component libraries (tokens, components, patterns) to ensure consistency, accessibility, and efficient handoff to engineering.
  • Specify interaction behavior, animations, and micro-interactions to communicate intent and motion to engineers, improving perceived performance and user delight.
  • Partner with front-end engineers during implementation to ensure pixel-perfect execution, address technical constraints, and iterate based on feasibility and performance considerations.
  • Synthesize analytics (product analytics, funnel analysis, heatmaps) with qualitative findings to prioritize UX debt and feature improvements that yield measurable business outcomes.
  • Lead cross-functional design workshops, design sprints, and ideation sessions to align stakeholders, accelerate decisions, and drive rapid prototype validation.
  • Advocate for accessibility and inclusive design by applying WCAG guidelines, performing accessibility audits, and producing remediations to ensure products are usable by people of all abilities.
  • Draft clear UX documentation including design specifications, interaction flows, acceptance criteria, and annotated designs to support efficient engineering handoffs and knowledge transfer.
  • Manage and prioritize a personal design backlog aligned with product objectives, balancing exploratory design, technical debt reduction, and feature delivery in an Agile environment.
  • Mentor junior designers and contributors by conducting design critiques, pairing sessions, and providing feedback focused on craft, research methods, and stakeholder communication.
  • Define and monitor UX success metrics, set benchmarks, and present results and roadmaps to executives and cross-functional stakeholders to gain alignment and investment.
  • Conduct competitive analysis and trend research to identify market opportunities, best practices, and evolving interaction patterns that inform future product concepts.
  • Facilitate cross-team reviews to ensure consistent brand experience across touchpoints including web, mobile, email, and in-product messaging.
  • Create user flows and task analyses for new features that reduce cognitive load, improve onboarding, and shorten time-to-first-value for new users.
  • Maintain a user-centered mindset by staying current with usability heuristics, design thinking methodologies, and emerging technologies (e.g., conversational UX, AR/VR considerations) that impact future roadmap decisions.
  • Coordinate remote and in-person usability labs and recruit target users, screen participants, and synthesize findings into stakeholder-ready insights and prioritized recommendations.
  • Drive continuous improvement by establishing UX KPIs, running iterative design experiments, and defining success criteria for all major releases.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist marketing and customer success with UX copy recommendations and landing page optimization to improve acquisition and onboarding funnels.
  • Provide post-launch monitoring and rapid iteration support for critical releases, including hotfixes for usability regressions.
  • Contribute to hiring efforts through portfolio reviews, interview panels, and candidate evaluations for design and research roles.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • User research methodologies: moderated/unmoderated usability testing, contextual inquiry, card sorting, tree testing, surveys, diary studies.
  • Interaction design and wireframing: proficient with Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, or equivalent prototyping tools.
  • High-fidelity prototyping and motion: experience building clickable prototypes and specifying micro-interactions for engineers.
  • Design systems: experience creating and maintaining component libraries, design tokens, and documentation (Storybook, Zeroheight).
  • Information architecture: creating sitemaps, taxonomies, and navigation systems that scale.
  • Accessibility (a11y): working knowledge of WCAG 2.1 AA, ARIA roles, and accessibility testing tools.
  • UX analytics: competency with product analytics (Amplitude, Mixpanel, Google Analytics) and qualitative tools (Hotjar, FullStory).
  • Front-end familiarity: basic understanding of HTML/CSS/JS to communicate constraints and support implementation.
  • Usability testing platforms: experience with UserTesting, Lookback, Optimal Workshop, or similar.
  • A/B testing and experimentation: design and interpretation of experiments and split tests to validate UX hypotheses.
  • Documentation and collaboration tools: Confluence, Notion, Jira, Miro, FigJam, and developer handoff tools.

Soft Skills

  • Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration; able to translate user insights into business-aligned recommendations.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to present research findings and design rationale to executives.
  • Empathy and user advocacy; prioritizes the user while balancing technical feasibility and business goals.
  • Critical thinking and problem-solving with a data-informed mindset; able to synthesize complex inputs into clear design decisions.
  • Time management and prioritization in fast-paced, ambiguous environments with multiple concurrent projects.
  • Facilitation and workshop leadership to align teams and accelerate decision-making.
  • Mentorship and coaching skills to grow the design craft in less experienced teammates.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning — stays current with UX trends, tools, and best practices.
  • Negotiation and influence skills to drive design decisions without formal authority.
  • Attention to detail and a strong sense of visual hierarchy and typographic best practices.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in HCI, Design, or related discipline; or executive education/certifications in UX research, design thinking, or product management.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
  • Interaction Design
  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Graphic / Visual Design
  • Computer Science / Front-End Development

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–7 years in UX, product design, or interaction design roles for mid-level positions; adjust for senior or lead roles accordingly.

Preferred:

  • Demonstrated experience delivering end-to-end UX on consumer or enterprise web and mobile products.
  • Track record of using research and data to drive measurable product improvements (conversion, retention, task success).
  • Portfolio showcasing process, artifacts (research, flows, wireframes, prototypes), and outcomes from past projects.
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