Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for UX Coordinator

🎯 Role Definition

The UX Coordinator is responsible for planning, executing, and operationalizing user experience activities across product teams. This role coordinates user research and usability testing, maintains design systems and research repositories, liaises between designers, product managers and engineers, and ensures research insights are translated into design improvements and measurable UX outcomes. The UX Coordinator enables efficient UX operations, improves design quality, and helps scale a data-informed, user-centered product culture.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Junior UX Designer or UX Research Assistant
Product Coordinator, Project Coordinator, or Design Intern
Front-end developer or visual designer with an interest in UX

Advancement To:

Senior UX Coordinator or UX Ops Lead
UX Manager or Design Manager
UX Research Lead or Product Design Lead

Lateral Moves:

UX Researcher
Product Manager
Interaction Designer or Content Strategist

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Plan, recruit, and execute moderated and unmoderated usability tests, remote and in-person user interviews, and diary studies; synthesize qualitative insights into clear, prioritized recommendations for product and design teams.
Build and manage a continuous user-research pipeline by scheduling sessions, recruiting representative participants, producing test scripts, and maintaining participant panels to ensure timely and reliable insight generation.
Coordinate cross-functional research and design sprints with product managers, designers, engineers, and data analysts to align on discovery goals, success metrics, and deliverables that move product decisions forward.
Create, maintain, and circulate research artifacts — research plans, interview guides, test reports, journey maps, personas, and executive summaries — with clear, action-oriented insights for stakeholders.
Establish and manage research logistics and tools (screening tools, recruiting vendors, UX lab resources, remote testing platforms such as UserTesting or Lookback), ensuring smooth and compliant participant experiences.
Maintain and evolve the company’s design system components and documentation, ensuring consistent application of UI patterns, tokens, accessibility standards, and contribution workflows across product teams.
Triage, tag, and index research findings in a searchable research repository or knowledge base so teams can discover insights, reuse learnings, and avoid duplicated work.
Run and optimize usability test protocols and metrics (task completion, time-on-task, SUS/UEQ, and qualitative sentiment) and deliver metrics dashboards and snapshot summaries to measure UX health and improvement over time.
Translate user insights into clear, prioritized action items and design tickets for engineering and design teams; track follow-through and outcomes to close the loop on research.
Design and build rapid prototypes and low- to mid-fidelity wireframes (in Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD) to validate concepts before engineering investment and to support iterative user testing.
Support A/B testing and experimentation workflows by translating qualitative findings into test hypotheses, defining target segments, and partnering with growth or analytics teams to measure UX impact.
Ensure accessibility (WCAG) best practices are applied in designs and research — conduct basic accessibility audits, tag issues, and liaise with engineering to prioritize fixes.
Facilitate stakeholder workshops, co-design sessions, and ideation meetings to align product vision around customer needs and to democratize research insights across the organization.
Create and maintain a UX onboarding toolkit and process for new hires and cross-functional partners so teams understand research practices, artifact naming conventions, and how to request UX work.
Manage the UX calendar and workload: prioritize requests, run intake processes, and negotiate scope to maximize research ROI and ensure timely delivery of critical studies.
Prepare executive-level presentations and concise research briefs that link user outcomes to business KPIs, product metrics, and strategic roadmaps to support data-driven decision-making.
Track and manage UX vendor relationships and budgets for participant recruitment, incentive fulfillment, usability labs, and specialized research tools to stay within budgets and service-level expectations.
Serve as the primary coordinator for longitudinal studies and product feedback programs (beta testing, advisory boards), maintaining continuity of learning and longitudinal data quality.
Support product launches by coordinating usability validation, final accessibility checks, and pre-launch QA in collaboration with product marketing, engineering, and customer support teams.
Coach and mentor junior UX staff and cross-functional partners in research methods, test moderation, and basic prototyping to raise organizational UX capability.
Implement and improve processes for research prioritization, documentation standards, and research-to-implementation workflows to scale UX operations as the company grows.
Monitor competitor UX and industry best practices, synthesize market research, and present trend reports that inform product strategy and differentiated user experiences.
Act as a conduit for customer feedback loops; collect, triage, and escalate qualitative and quantitative feedback from support, sales, and CS teams into researchable questions and prioritized product improvements.
Coordinate ethical and compliant participant management practices (consent, data privacy, secure storage of recordings) and ensure research activities adhere to internal policies and local regulations.

Secondary Functions

Assist with basic UX analytics by pulling funnel, heatmap, and event data in collaboration with product analytics to complement qualitative research insights.
Maintain and version design assets, pattern libraries, and component documentation to minimize design debt and speed up implementation.
Support product marketing with user quotes, screenshots, and validated value propositions for messaging and positioning after consent and legal review.
Provide ad-hoc design support for pitch decks, investor demos, and cross-functional presentations requiring clear UX visuals and user stories.
Help recruit participants and manage incentive payments, including logistical coordination and vendor invoice reconciliation.
Develop and run internal UX training sessions and brown-bags to upskill teams on fundamentals of usability testing, persona usage, and design thinking.
Support product accessibility remediation triage by documenting issues, recommending fixes, and monitoring remediation status.
Keep a prioritized backlog of UX improvements and research questions, and coordinate sprint-ready tasks with product owners and engineering.
Facilitate post-launch retrospectives focused on user feedback and usability learnings to inform next iterations.
Produce regular UX health reports highlighting trends in usability metrics, recurring pain points, and the ROI of research initiatives.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

User research methods: proficiency in planning and conducting moderated and unmoderated usability tests, in-depth interviews, card sorts, and diary studies.
Prototyping & wireframing: practical experience building low- to mid-fidelity prototypes in Figma, Sketch, Axure, or Adobe XD to validate design hypotheses.
Design systems & component libraries: experience maintaining pattern libraries, documenting components, and managing versioning and contribution processes.
UX tools & platforms: familiarity with remote testing tools (UserTesting, Lookback, Optimal Workshop), collaboration platforms (Miro, FigJam), and research repositories (Dovetail, Airtable).
Accessibility standards: working knowledge of WCAG guidelines and basic accessibility evaluation techniques.
Usability metrics & analytics: ability to capture and interpret SUS scores, task completion rates, time-on-task, and basic funnel and event analysis in partnership with analytics teams.
Participant recruitment & screening: expertise managing recruitment strategies, screener creation, panel management, and incentive logistics.
Basic HTML/CSS literacy: ability to read and communicate UI constraints with engineers and to create simple interactive prototypes when needed.
Reporting & storytelling: strong capability to synthesize qualitative data into concise research reports, executive summaries, and evidence-backed recommendations.
Experimentation literacy: understanding of A/B test design, hypothesis formulation, and collaboration with analytics/growth teams.
Project & stakeholder management: proficiency in work intake systems, prioritization frameworks, and progress reporting using tools like Jira, Asana, or Trello.
Data privacy & compliance: awareness of consent practices, data handling, and secure storage for recorded research sessions.

Soft Skills

Strong communication: articulates research findings and design rationale clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Collaboration: proven ability to work cross-functionally with product managers, engineers, designers, and marketing to drive outcomes.
Empathy: deep customer empathy to represent diverse user needs and advocate for inclusive product experiences.
Organization & time management: excels at juggling multiple studies, deadlines, and stakeholder requests with calm and reliability.
Critical thinking: synthesizes mixed-methods data and prioritizes recommendations based on impact and feasibility.
Influence & facilitation: confident running workshops, aligning stakeholders, and negotiating scope and timelines.
Attention to detail: thorough in documentation, research tagging, and maintaining quality in design artifacts.
Adaptability: comfortable in fast-moving environments and iterating processes to suit evolving product needs.
Mentoring: ability to coach junior designers and non-design stakeholders in UX best practices.
Problem-solving: pragmatic approach to turning research insights into actionable product solutions.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Interaction Design, Psychology, Human Factors, Graphic Design, Communications, or a related field — or equivalent practical experience and a strong portfolio.

Preferred Education:

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in HCI, Cognitive Psychology, Information Science, or Design; certifications in UX research, UX strategy, or accessibility are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

2–5 years of professional UX experience, including at least 1–2 years coordinating or running research and usability programs.

Preferred:

3+ years in UX roles with demonstrated experience managing research logistics, building or maintaining a design system, and working cross-functionally in product teams. Experience with enterprise or consumer web/mobile products, and familiarity with accessibility standards and experimentation frameworks is preferred.