Design Lead

Let's Write Africa's Story Together!

Old Mutual is a firm believer in the African opportunity and our diverse talent reflects this.

Job Description

To help build and lead the Experience Design capability that will inform and execute the Digital Servicing portfolio through a user-centred design approach.

An opportunity has arisen for a Lead Experience Designer reporting to the Head of Design to help build and lead the Experience Design capability that will inform and execute the Digital Servicing portfolio through a user-centred design approach. This will involve the support of user research, interaction design, prototyping, user testing and experience measurement activities in their various guises as well as the management of experience design standards, methods and frameworks. This role will also lead efforts that enable visually aligned and aesthetically elevated, human-centred Designs for the business portfolio.

The incumbent will have a customer-first, human-centered mentality as well as be grounded in design & systems thinking as a way to transform our business. A deep understanding of customer research, knowledge gathering, experience measurement, ideation, concept visualization and prototyping, interaction design, design evaluation and validation. The role incumbent understands the creative direction and holds the alignment of visual and interaction language with other Digital platforms.

Specific responsibilities:

Establish the User Experience Design capability and ensure integration and alignment with all its associated disciplines of UI, Content, Behavioural Economics.

Manage and plan the recruitment and allocation of User Experience Designers based on their fit to digital experience design initiatives.

Ensure that knowledge management and collaboration platform(s) cater for UX design processes, tools and artefacts.

Establish processes support that facilitate easy and continuous user engagement at testing facilities for research and testing.

Work with Digital Products Owners, Ecommerce, Digital Analytics, Digital Marketing and Digital Operations that product design decisions are always customer Led.

Work with product owners and technical leads to scope experience design requirements to help develop product plans.

Define and implement methods for coordination and communication between different tribes, feature teams.

Carry out mentorship and coaching to ensure adherence to methods and protocols established in the integrated digital experience design capability.

Ensure that User experience leverages the measurement framework for the experience performance of Old Mutual Limited touchpoints and that the analysis of performance drives design decisions and continuous improvements.

Track and monitor digital experience design program status and metrics to ensure milestones are met, and internal and external delivery commitments are met within the different sprints.

Monitor and shape digital experience design work output through standardized and integrated design methods across the various design disciplines, resource allocation and optimisation regularly.

Ensure that all decisions are data-led through regular user testing and reporting, customer research and insights and the application of data analysis techniques.

Ensure digital experience design teams have sufficient and consistent access to customers and users to define, refine, validate and test their designs and hypotheses on an ongoing basis. This applies to all areas of design: Feature, UX, UI, Visual Design and Design Thinking.

Influence change and business decisions through partnerships with others.

Work as needed with customers and users to understand their needs in order to build the right things and build the right things right.

Work with product owners across the Digital business to understand market needs & vision; work with teams to quickly translate that vision into designs for working software.

Lead the bench strength capable of sustaining Old Mutual Digital and Customer-Led ambition.

Demonstrate a strong understanding of Agile / Lean methodologies and the structures and processes required for continuous delivery.

Ensure effective documentation and communication of design are created by digital experience design teams - via prototypes, workflows, journey maps, wireframes, mockups, story definition, usability findings and UI designs.

Ensure that design is holistic across its dimensions and that the final experience outcome is a composite whole of the various disciplines in the design process.

Continuous Evangelisation of the digital experience design practice within the digital capability and broader Old Mutual limited group.

Identify skill gaps within the team and work to fill gaps with talent, experience and training; develop, on board and implement new tools and processes to enable and sustain the team.

Manage the design (standards, patterns, components, tools etc.) and knowledge (customer, business, trends, metrics etc.) frameworks that form the basis of the Old Mutual digital experience design environment.

Establish continuous learning and growth within the digital experience design practice, ensuring that it stays current with modern trends.

Manage suppliers within the User experience design landscape, ensuring that they are delivering to expectations and contractual agreements.

Key Result Areas:

The role will have the following main priorities/deliverables:

Ensure that the Digital Servicing portfolio business direction is Experience-led through ecosystem data & insights.

Lead the user experience design process and associated design capabilities (Research, Design, User testing) in the various stages of design from concept to implementation and continuous improvement.

The translation of design into developed and adopted products are baseline for this role building and leading a design team within both strategic and delivery environments for commercial objectives - Customer Experience, Digital product adoption, Digital Sales, and Experience outcomes.

Technical Proficiencies:

Plans and leads digital experience design team engagements with product owners and other business stakeholders to frame problems, appropriately prioritize and scope design efforts, and receive and respond to design feedback, with the ultimate goal of releasing a high-quality product that is valued by Old Mutual customers.

Influences and plans work with product and engineering teams to ensure use of participatory design activities (e.g. paper prototype co-creation, card sorting) to understand vision, business model assumptions and tacit knowledge about user needs and behaviours.

Design Sprint facilitation

Ensure delivery builds time into roadmaps for design teams to conduct user research to understand user needs, mental models and working contexts.

Ensure standardization of top-level synthesis of outputs of stakeholder research & creation of visualizations that effectively summarize key insights related to user and customer needs and behaviours, product definition.

Plans for delivery teams scoping to include creation of interactive low-fidelity and high-fidelity annotated prototypes or wireframes of user interface designs that visually and textually communicate the behaviour of digital products.

Ensure that user testing of various kinds (formative and summative usability testing, AB testing, surveys etc.) form the basis of approval of design for implementation.

Facilitate the integration of high-quality visual and interaction design and front-end development to generate engaging and enriched UI design, in line with UX prototypes and design strategies.

Maintain reusable design systems that allow for consistency, embedded quality and design efficiency within the digital products.

Ensure that user experience design teams work in a productive collaboration with other design & technology teams to fully leverage technology capabilities while supporting continuous delivery.

Experience outcomes Measurement

Service design

Preferred Experience:

Bachelors Degree in Interaction, Graphic, or Industrial Design preferred or in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math.

6 to 8 years of professional User experience design, with deep knowledge and skills in generating digital experience outcomes.

A minimum of 3 years of professional experience in people and team management.

Consulting experience advantageous

Experience in Financial Services Industry

Experience in customer research, knowledge gathering, experience measurement, ideation, concept visualization and prototyping, interaction design, design evaluation and validation, essential

Experience in User Experience Capability Build, Design Leadership and execution beyond Design in tribes and feature teams.

Skills

Education

Closing Date

05 February 2024

The appointment will be made from the designated group in line with the Employment Equity Plan of Old Mutual South Africa and the specific business unit in question.

Old Mutual Limited is pro-vaccination and encourages its workforce to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19.

All prospective employees are required to disclose their vaccination status as part of the recruitment process.

Please refer to the Old Mutuals Covid-19 vaccination policy for further detail. Kindly note that Old Mutual reserves the right to reinstate the requirement to vaccinate at any point if it is of the view that it is imperative to do so.

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