As the Design, you’re a high-performing leader for the studio, working closely with our other leaders  to guide teams and ensure that our work is true to AKQA’s mission and values: thoughtful, innovative, high quality, and in service of our clients and their customers.

Your role involves: Being an advocate for design, championing human-centred design (HCD) processes and techniques across our work; demonstrating a strong sense of craft and deep expertise in digital design, assuming Experience Design custodianship for clients; fearlessly telling clients things they may know, but are afraid to hear; acting as an escalation point for the UX and Design teams across multiple projects/accounts; nurturing, and guiding project teams and direct reports; and, collaborating with interdisciplinary project teams to create innovative solutions.

You have the knowledge, skillset, and experience to autonomously direct HCD projects from start to finish. It’s important that you lead by example, mentor and guide teams to do their best work, be close to the work, demonstrate your craft and thinking throughout, and ensure consistently high quality across our work. Equally, you’re expected to actively plan the team structure and team management, collaborate on making business cases for design, and lead pitch efforts to help grow the business.

As part of the Experience Design Leadership Team at AKQA, the Experience Design Director also provides compelling thought leadership internally and externally, is a champion of AKQA, takes an active role in demonstrating its values and its services, influences key client stakeholder relationships and influences AKQA’s overall vision, product, strategy, brand and culture.

ROLE REQUIREMENTS

• Identify opportunities to improve quality and increase efficiency through cross-discipline collaborative design.
• Champion human-centred design (HCD) principles and processes ensuring outcomes meet both business and user goals.
• Apply solid user experience and service design principles while looking for opportunities to innovate.
• Demonstrate expert knowledge of all aspects of UI/ UX and the ability to apply them flexibly across a variety of project types.
• Expertise with prototyping tools such as Invision, Axure, Flinto, Fand Framer; along with design tools such as Sketch, Figma and Adobe CC
• Be able to lead multiple accounts as a consultant to clients across various solution frameworks (i.e. agile).
• Lead UX / design team to deliver end-to-end experience design projects through discovery, definition, solution and build phases.
• Ensure the quality of key client relationships and engagement.
• Ensure projects are up to date on the latest UI/ UX and service design methods
• Demonstrate thought leadership in Experience Design, both to clients and to the industry as required.
• Seasoned professional with hands-on Technical experience of Brand & Experience Strategy, Data analysis, Information architecture, Interaction design , Interactive prototyping, Interface design, Landscape & competitor reviews, Product design, Product Roadmaps, Wireframes, Workshop facilitation & Visual design.

QUALIFICATIONS & CHARACTERISTICS

• Provide leadership, inspire team members for innovation, encourage creative thinking and positively influence others.
• Foster a culture of proactivity, passion and energy for client’s businesses.
• Encourage cross-discipline collaboration and readily provide consultation and assistance to the broader team.
• Embody a culture of continuous improvement, embracing diversity and inclusion.

• Planning of activities and work estimation for proposed work.
• Ensure output of the project is of the highest quality.
• Develop a solutions-focused team.

• Define and maintain career development plans for all direct reports, including regular check-ins.
• Develop individual team members through mentoring, internal training and external training.

• Develop case studies for Design output, innovations and processes.
• Respond effectively to client needs.

AKQA is an Equal Opportunities Employer, we believe that diversity is vital to AKQA’s ability to provide our clients with the best recommendations and are committed to fostering a varied and inclusive work environment. Your race, colour, ancestry, religion, gender, gender identity, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability or veteran status have no bearing on our hiring decisions. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.