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Interaction Designer (Prototyper) - Palo Alto

Position Summary:

IDEO’s Knowledge Sharing team is responsible for facilitating collaboration across the organization through the strategic and socially-appropriate use of technology. To support this aim, the knowledge sharing team is constantly experimenting with new tools (both off-the-shelf and home-grown).

IDEO is seeking an Interaction Designer for the Knowledge Sharing team with excellent prototyping and build-to-think skills. The candidate should be a design thinker and craftsperson, be able to thoughtfully contribute in a team environment during a project’s user research and concept development phases, and be passionate about expressing interactions as working prototypes that demonstrate social and behavioral concepts. The responsibilities of this position will vary depending on the project, but the candidate should be comfortable participating in all parts of the user-centered design process and with creating deliverables at varying levels of fidelity: from quickly communicating a concept through rough prototyping, to integrating disparate off-the-shelf tools in order to push understood boundaries.

Key Activities:

First and foremost… you’re a great human-centered interaction designer.

You’ve applied your skills to real-world human problems (not just artistic or academic exercises). Your designs are always grounded in some insight(s) about people, and you understand the value of building to think.

You have “depth and breadth” in many different ways. For example, you may have considerable experience in mobile application development, but you’ve also designed web applications (or vice versa). Or aircraft pilot displays. Or interactive exhibits. Or [insert your portfolio here].

You’re excited about exploring new interaction models, from the general (multi-touch) to the arcane (rethinking a timecard system, etc.). You can easily switch from macro to micro: from understanding the strategic value and business dynamics of collaboration across the organization, to proving out a concept by iterating in code.

You know the ropes when it comes to bread-and-butter UX deliverables: guidelines and specification documents; wireframes and delta charts, but you’re also great at hacking together something that works – and proves a concept – out of nothing.

Your work is best in a participatory, collaborative, team based work environment. You inspire teams through collaboration as well as direction, vision and planning of projects and deliverables. You have strong, verbal, written and visual presentation skills.

You must be comfortable building in a number of frameworks…

  • Flex/Flash builder with Actionscript 3

  • HTML5 & CSS3

  • Javascript + Jquery

  • Ruby / Rails and PHP

  • Cocoa / Objective C

  • Basic linux and Windows server configuration

  • Fireworks, Illustrator, and/or Photoshop (for wireframes and mockups)

  • Templating languages (e.g. wordpress, erb, haml, etc)

… And you do more than code:

  • You have a passion (and eye) for visual details

  • You’re a motion nerd (flash / after effects animation a plus)

  • You have a hard time taking “no” for an answer; you prefer to find a way

  • You have experiencing supporting and scaling prototypes you’ve built in the past

  • You have a strong opinion about Git and SVN

Additional Skills Required:

All candidates should include a link to their portfolio or provide work samples as part of the application process. Please indicate your role and contribution for each project submitted.

Location — Palo Alto