Experience Designer

High Alpha Innovation co-creates advantaged startups that solve compelling problems. Part strategic advisory, part venture builder, our team is a diverse mix of highly experienced company creators, designers, and strategists who work with world-class entrepreneurs, corporations, and universities to build, invest in, and scale venture studios and advantaged startups.

Our Build team is trusted to help our partners get started on their venture building journey, develop an enduring mechanism for venture creation, manage organizational tension, create an advantage for the companies they are launching with us, increase the odds of startup success, and secure additional resources and funding. 

The Experience Designer is a valued member of the Build team. The Experience Designer’s primary role is to bring the user’s voice to the team and pair it with your expertise in design research, strategy, and user interface design. Working with the business design process, you will facilitate design working sessions with the program team to ideate, create conceptual mockups, gather feedback, and work to bring the company idea to life through human-centered design.

Job Responsibilities

Design Research

• Discover underlying patterns, and problems and relate them to customers within a space, understand the underlying and sometimes hidden desires, needs, and challenges of end users
• Design a research plan that uncovers themes in the landscape, complete with competitor UX/UI research
• User journey mapping; visualize what customers experience; what they are thinking, feeling, and doing, and highlight key pain points that a new product aims to address
• User/buyer persona development; demographic information, motivation, and pain points. Technology landscape: other products they use, comfort level with tech; other. What are their preferences: color psychology, brands they enjoy, things that will turn them off

Design Strategy//User Experience 

• Think creatively and derive potential solutions that help in engaging the customers
• Brainstorm and design solutions; prioritize problem space with the team
• Create low-fi wireframes, sketch the first draft of the user experience for early feedback
• Take feedback from customer interviews to iterate on the concept and understand whether a solution solves the problem 
• Ideate and begin the naming process, working closely with team members to identify viable naming options for new companies.
• Create product feature documentation; a living ‘how we got here’ doc; cross-referenced with jobs to be done with product features and outlines what made it to the MVP for sprint week, and what will be completed post sprint week

UI Design 

• Manage the design process from wireframing and prototyping to final design, ensuring interfaces map back to key value propositions and are visually appealing
• Adapt the existing storyboard and identify key features that need to be highlighted on pitch day.

Skills Needed

• 2+ years of experience as a UX practitioner with a focus on customer discovery and research
• Keep a pulse on emerging cultural trends and technology, and hold a developed point of view about your work
• Proven ability to surface and articulate human-centered insight to answer business questions
• Understand and empathize with users, their goals, and their needs

• Ability to design storyboards and build and use prototypes to craft compelling stories to test and receive feedback on product direction
• Deep knowledge and expertise across design methodologies and clear dedication to being a champion of design and design thinking
• Ability to effectively communicate with team members and leaders who may not speak design natively
• Strong presentation skills with a creative and compelling storytelling style
• Proficient in design and prototyping tools like Sketch, Figma, Invision, Photoshop, InVision, and InDesign

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Medical, dental & vision Insurance with employer HSA contribution
• Company paid STD/LTD and Life Insurance 
• Unlimited PTO plan to encourage a healthy work - life balance 
• 22 paid company holidays 
• 401k with company contribution
• A remote first culture. Work from anywhere in the continental United States 
• Company provided laptop plus a monthly technology stipend to help cover additional working expenses 
• A collaborative, entrepreneurial environment with a proven venture studio playbook
• The opportunity to create, build and grow innovative products with world class founders

WHAT WE VALUE :

WE BUILD

We make decisions with imperfect information and quickly move forward. We take action. We are comfortable with discomfort, and we measure our results in terms of what we build.

WE ARE BOLD

We seek, uncover, and speak truth. We are endlessly curious, we dream big and we lead through vision. Our ideas change the world.

WE CREATE OPPORTUNITY

We aim to create as much opportunity for as many people as possible, and we believe startups are a powerful vehicle for doing so. By creating opportunity, we create joy for ourselves, our loved ones, our corporate partners, and if we’re doing it right -- the world.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER

High Alpha Innovation is an equal opportunity employer, and we value diversity at our company. We do not just accept diverse backgrounds, we celebrate them. Our company, the work we do, and our partners benefit from the value of a diverse team. No team member's value lies alone in their diversity, and because we value diversity so highly, we reiterate that all hiring and employment decisions are made on merit, performance, competence, and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.