Whipsaw is looking for a Lead UX/UI Designer with an intuitive understanding of interaction design and user interfaces combined with a strong eye for visual design. Whipsaw is a highly acclaimed strategy, industrial design, digital design, and engineering consulting firm based in San Francisco. For over 20 years, Whipsaw has created successful products and immersive experiences for diverse industries including consumer electronics, housewares, computing, robotics, medical, scientific, and commercial products for clients such as Google, Brita, Cisco, Dell, Ford, GE, Meta, Tile, Intel, Merck, Nike, Olympus, Samsung, Sony, Uber, and Tonal. Whipsaw is renowned for its design ideology and intuitive product solutions that enrich the human experience.

We are looking for a motivated team player who is passionate about UI design excellence and will support the team with ideation, concept execution, and preparation of pixel-perfect UI assets for handoff to our software teams. You are motivated by solving complex challenges in various domains and delivering elegant visual solutions. Your expertise will enable us to innovate in both what we make and how we make it. This means designing with both craft and thought, and executing with consistency and quality. An interest in the intersection between hardware and digital interfaces is key to this role, so experience designing for interfaces outside of mobile and web is desired but not essential. This role will be a hybrid position based out of the San Francisco studio.

In this role, we’re looking for someone who can:

Collaborate and Communicate

• Lead strategic design and user-experience decisions for web, mobile, and human-machine-interface applications.
• Collaborate and mentor team members on design solution ideation, concept development, and refinement.
• Lead the creation and presentation of brainstorming sessions, workshops, demos on user journeys, mockups, and other deliverables to client development teams, business stakeholders, and product teams.
• Contribute to Whipsaw’s Design team culture as a leader in UX and interaction design across the company.

Create Digital Experiences

• Move from research to user flows and wireframes, into detailed visual mockups to develop an informed design language and thoughtful product execution.
• Develop high-level and/or detailed user interfaces and prototypes, and wireframes to effectively communicate interaction and design ideas.
• Guide and contribute to developing beautiful visual design languages, design system development, visual design, or brand directions.

Conduct & Synthesize Research

• Be a passionate advocate and practitioner of design best practices using participatory and iterative design techniques, including observational studies, customer interviews, usability testing, competitive audits, market research, and other forms of requirements discovery.
• Organize research findings into actionable insights, opportunities, and design principles that genuinely inspire and can be utilized during the design process.
• Support informative qualitative research, user requirements analysis, task analysis, information architecture design, and usability testing.

You Have

• A minimum of five years of professional experience as a UX Designer.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in human-computer interaction, visual design, interaction design, or a related field.
• Experience implementing visual design systems across platforms in an iterative software development environment.
• Strong portfolio with well-articulated work examples and an ability to communicate your design and the decisions that led to it through strong verbal, written, and visual presentation skills.
• Proficiency in Figma.

You May Have (but it’s not a dealbreaker if you don’t)

• Familiarity with physical product design and how UX methods work in both the physical and digital product spaces
• Experience working in an agency or consulting environment.
• Planning and conducting user research, usability testing, rapid prototyping, heuristic analysis, and identifying accessibility concerns.
• Graduate degree in HCI, interaction design, or similar.