Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for User Experience Officer

🎯 Role Definition

The User Experience Officer (UX Officer) is a senior, strategic, and hands-on leader responsible for defining and delivering exceptional user experiences across digital products and customer touchpoints. This role partners with Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Customer Success to translate customer insight and business strategy into measurable design outcomes. The UX Officer establishes UX best practices, oversees user research and testing programs, builds and governs design systems, and champions accessibility and usability across the organization.

Key focus areas include UX strategy and governance, user research and testing, interaction and service design, design operations, and metrics-driven improvement of customer experience (CX). The UX Officer balances leadership, mentorship, and tactical delivery to improve conversion, retention, and overall satisfaction.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior UX Designer or Lead Product Designer
UX Researcher / Senior Service Designer
Product Design Manager or Interaction Designer

Advancement To:

Head of UX / Director of User Experience
VP of Product Design or Chief Experience Officer (CXO)
Head of Design Operations / Chief Product Officer (with product focus)

Lateral Moves:

Product Management (Senior Product Manager)
Service Design Lead
Customer Experience (CX) Director

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead the development and execution of a clear, measurable UX strategy that aligns with corporate goals, product roadmaps, and customer success targets; set quarterly UX priorities and OKRs to drive adoption and measurable improvements.
Design, implement, and manage a continuous user research and usability testing program (qualitative and quantitative) including moderated and unmoderated testing, diary studies, contextual inquiry, and field research to surface actionable insights.
Create and maintain detailed user journeys, experience maps, and personas grounded in primary research and analytics to inform product decisions and prioritization across teams.
Build, scale, and govern a cross-platform design system (tokens, components, patterns, documentation) to ensure design consistency, increase engineering efficiency, and reduce time-to-market.
Produce high-fidelity wireframes, interactive prototypes, and pixel-perfect design specs using tools like Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD; partner with engineering to ensure faithful implementation.
Lead accessibility strategy and compliance (WCAG 2.1/2.2), conduct accessibility audits, prioritize remediation, and embed accessibility checks into SDLC and design reviews.
Partner with Product Management and Engineering to define UX requirements, acceptance criteria, and user stories; participate in sprint planning and backlog grooming to ensure UX priorities are represented.
Define and track UX and CX metrics (NPS, SUS, task success rate, time-on-task, conversion, retention) to demonstrate product impact and inform continuous improvement.
Conduct heuristic evaluations, cognitive walkthroughs, and usability audits to identify friction points and recommend prioritized fixes.
Run A/B and multivariate tests in collaboration with data teams to validate design hypotheses and quantify UX improvements against business metrics.
Lead cross-functional design workshops (design sprints, ideation, co-creation) to accelerate solution discovery and alignment across stakeholders.
Mentor and grow UX team members, provide continuous feedback, recruit top UX talent, and create career development pathways to raise overall design maturity.
Establish UX governance, design review cadences, and stakeholder communication channels to align design decisions with legal, brand, and business requirements.
Translate complex business requirements and technical constraints into elegant, usable experiences that prioritize user needs and reduce cognitive load.
Oversee user feedback loops including in-product feedback, support tickets analysis, and customer advisory panels; convert qualitative feedback into prioritized product work.
Maintain and evangelize UX documentation — style guides, pattern libraries, research repositories, and playbooks — that enable self-serve reuse by product teams.
Collaborate with analytics and data science teams to instrument UX events, analyze funnels, and derive insights from quantitative data (Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude).
Drive cross-channel UX consistency (web, mobile, native apps, kiosks) to deliver cohesive brand and interaction patterns across platforms.
Manage vendor relationships for specialized research, usability testing platforms, and accessibility remediation services as needed.
Advocate for user-centered design at executive levels; prepare and present research findings, roadmaps, and ROI cases to senior leadership and stakeholders.
Prioritize and allocate UX team capacity against product priorities, ensuring high-impact delivery while balancing discovery and delivery workstreams.
Define and enforce UX quality assurance processes, including sign-off criteria, QA test cases, and post-launch usability monitoring.
Collaborate with marketing, content, and localization teams to ensure copy, microcopy, and messaging align with UX tone, clarity, and internationalization best practices.
Drive operational improvements in design operations (DesignOps) to standardize workflows, reduce handoff friction, and improve collaboration efficiency.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc analytics requests and exploratory data analysis in partnership with data teams to answer user behavior questions and hypothesis testing.
Contribute to the organization's product and data strategy by identifying UX instrumentation needs and roadmapping research investments.
Facilitate cross-disciplinary sprint ceremonies (planning, standups, retrospectives) to keep UX work integrated into Agile delivery.
Provide UX oversight for marketing and customer communications to ensure consistent experience across acquisition and retention channels.
Participate in budgeting for UX research tools, design licenses, and educational programs to upskill the team.
Represent the UX function in external forums, user conferences, and vendor briefings to keep the organization at the forefront of UX trends.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Expert-level proficiency in user research methods: interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing, surveys, and longitudinal studies.
Advanced interaction design skills including wireframing, information architecture, and high-fidelity prototyping in Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, or equivalent.
Experience building and maintaining design systems, component libraries, and design tokens with documentation and governance processes.
Strong knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1/2.2), assistive technologies, and experience conducting accessibility audits and remediation planning.
Proficiency with analytics and experimentation platforms (Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Optimizely) for measuring UX outcomes and running A/B tests.
Solid understanding of front-end technologies (HTML5, CSS3, responsive design, basic JavaScript) to collaborate effectively with engineering teams.
Experience creating and analyzing usability metrics: SUS, task success, completion time, error rate, and net promoter score (NPS).
Skilled in UX research tooling and repositories (UserTesting, Lookback, Dovetail, Optimal Workshop, FullStory/Hotjar).
Familiarity with Agile/Scrum workflows and tools (JIRA, Confluence, Trello) for integrating UX into product delivery.
Strong documentation skills for design specifications, research reports, and executive presentations.

Soft Skills

Strategic thinker with the ability to translate business objectives into user-centered product outcomes.
Exceptional stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration skills; able to influence product, engineering, and executive teams.
Excellent communication and presentation skills — able to tell compelling research stories and explain design trade-offs.
Strong leadership and people management experience including coaching, recruiting, and performance management.
High emotional intelligence and empathy for users and teammates; adept at balancing user needs with business constraints.
Problem-solving mindset with curiosity, grit, and the ability to drive results in ambiguous environments.
Prioritization and time-management skills to balance discovery, design, and delivery responsibilities.
Facilitation skills for workshops, ideation sessions, and design sprints.
Data-informed decision making — comfortable synthesizing qualitative and quantitative evidence to form recommendations.
Advocacy for accessibility, inclusion, and ethical design practices.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Interaction Design, Psychology, Computer Science, Graphic Design, or related field.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree or additional certification in HCI, Human Factors, UX Research, Design Management, or related disciplines.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
Interaction Design / Product Design
Cognitive Psychology / Human Factors
Computer Science / Software Engineering
Information Architecture / Library Science
Visual Communication / Graphic Design

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–10+ years in UX, with at least 2–4 years in a senior or leadership capacity (lead, manager, or officer-level).

Preferred:

7+ years of progressive UX and product experience including leading teams, building design systems, and partnering with executive leadership.
Demonstrated track record of shipping measurable product improvements (e.g., increased conversion, reduced support costs, improved NPS).
Experience across B2B and/or B2C digital products, mobile and web platforms, and complex multi-stakeholder environments.