Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Niche is the leader in school search, dedicated to making the process of researching and enrolling in schools easy and transparent. As an Associate Product Designer, you will collaborate with senior designers and cross-functional teams to create user flows, interfaces, and prototypes that enhance user experiences for students and educational partners.
Responsibilities
- Evaluate the current state user experience and work cross-functionally with Product, Data, and Engineering to identify UX/UI issues preventing users from getting the most value out of Niche, propose and implement improvements
- Support senior designers on larger projects by creating user flows, wireframes, and high-fidelity prototypes that address clear user and business needs
- Assist others with lightweight evaluative/usability research to test solutions, analysis results and apply the findings to your designs
- Create clear design specs and collaborate with engineers to support smooth handoff and implementation
- Leverage qualitative and quantitative data to understand what’s working/not working, iterate on shipped experiences, and improve performance
- Participate in design critiques, team rituals, cross-functional meetings
- Support documentation and maintenance of design patterns, in partnership with senior designers and design system contributors
- Learn about Niche by meeting with various team members to learn more about our company through our Onboarding meetings
- Meet and get familiar with your cross-functional team, the designers you’re supporting, and key stakeholders
- Understand the company mission and vision, business model, and current state of the product
- Get familiar with our design tools, knowledge base, and research insights with help from other designers
- Join product team meetings and sprint cycles, starting with shadowing senior designers on projects in flight and stepping in to help under their direction
- Fully operating in your role, assisting senior designers in your surface area with defining the solution space for well-understood problems, through to shipping
- Assisting with evaluative research (testing your own solutions)
- Starting to tackle new projects with support from senior designers
- Giving and receiving constructive and thoughtful feedback in design reviews and critiques
- Comfortable identifying and advocating for improvements, both for the user experience in your area, as well as the way team work gets done and how collaboration happens
- Becoming proficient in your design process, solving defined problems with a deep understanding of business objectives, user needs, and technical constraints
- Growing autonomy with defining and developing solutions independently, with reviews and oversight from senior designers
- Strong understanding of products across Niche, recognizing patterns and starting to contribute to design strategy in your surface area
- Building skills necessary for a potential future promotion to Career level
Skills
- At least 1 year of professional experience in a product/UX design role, where you have designed solutions and worked with Engineering to deliver them live to production
- All applicants must submit a portfolio of product experiences that showcase user flows, interface design, prototypes, polish and shipping. Please include examples of how you organized your designs and docs, such as Figma file hierarchies, documenting and prioritizing feedback, handoff processes, etc
- Great taste and keen eye for craft and quality, sweating the details and using your knowledge of industry patterns and trends to deliver visually appealing solutions with great usability
- Familiar with Figma, design systems, and other modern design tools – no prior experience with generative AI is required
- Curious and eager to understand user behavior, mental models, and product constraints
- Able to balance user needs, business goals, and technical constraints
- Proactively collaborate to overcome challenges, seek assistance to unblock yourself
- Comfortable iterating quickly with feedback from users, PMs, engineers, key stakeholders
- Resilience and flexibility that helps you adapt to a fast-paced work environment, frequent changes, and considerable ambiguity
- Bonus if you have experience with visual design for digital products, design systems and component libraries, and/or analyzing and interpreting data
Benefits
- Best-in-class 100% paid employee health plan, including vision and dental and supplemental coverage
- Flexible Paid Time Off Policy
- Stipend that allows you to build your work from home office in a style and function that suits your personal preferences
- Parental leave for all employees (12 weeks fully paid) in addition to short term disability for birthing parents
- Meaningful 401(k) with employer match
Company Overview
Niche is modernizing the way students and families choose their best-fit schools and colleges, and how institutions build their future classes. It was founded in 2002, and is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, with a workforce of 201-500 employees. Its website is http://niche.com.