Head of Product Design

About the Studio

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Education and knowledge are changing swiftly across society, with tech advancements and new devices and platforms becoming integral to how kids learn and grow. This job opportunity presents a unique opportunity for you to understand why – all while joining an outstanding collaborative effort.

If all of this sounds great, you are the best person to join the great team behind one of the best modern creative and educational apps available today. This award-winning company has a passionate, committed team that aims to create unforgettable experiences for kids of all ages, supporting their emotional and social development and improving their sleep and relaxation.

Does this sound like a laudable mission for you? Then, keep reading.

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Responsibilities and Requirements

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Our client is looking for a Head of Product Design with outstanding visual design, UX/UI and illustration & animation knowledge to create exceptional child-centred experiences for its leading educational app. This person will be involved in every aspect of the product development & design process — from brainstorming our next great product innovation to tweaking pixels right before launch — and a successful candidate will collaborate closely with colleagues across multiple disciplines & contribute to high-level strategic decision-making. As Head of Product Design, you will play a vital role in the way we build technologies — ensuring they are visually beautiful, valuable and easy to use. You’ll have the chance to solve complex design & product problems, utilizing the full range of your product design, interaction design & visual design skills. 

Alongside exceptional product design and innovation, you will be tasked with elevating the app’s complete design system to help us meet our high expectations for exceptional design & brand familiarity. The Design System, and all components thereof, will remain a key focus of this role and will support you in designing and implementing a brand-centric app redesign to improve upon existing UI. You will be in charge of developing & applying updated system interface elements, icons, text styles, and uniform terminology to existing and new features. A successful candidate will work cross-functionally to identify emerging trends and turn them into reusable patterns, develop and maintain a pattern library and documentation and advocate for UI standards and accessibility with designers and senior stakeholders.

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• Own creative and innovative feature design to elevate the app and guide our product into the future 
• Take broad, conceptual ideas & turn them into visually beautiful, useful, intuitive & valuable designs and features for the app users; design flows & experiences that simplify and distil down complex actions into usable interfaces
• Work closely with product/marketing to design new experiences, layouts & branded UI elements that evolve & define visual systems and align with the app’s current visual identity
• Work day-to-day in a larger, cross-functional team of engineers, marketers, product managers & customer experience teams to contribute to strategic decisions around the future direction of new features or products
• Build & maintain an end-to-end design system for all app surfaces and formats (iOS, Android, desktop, and responsive web) and enforce consistency and coherence across the brand, product and design system. 
• Connect the dots across experiences and teams to create a cohesive system and customer experience (including but not limited to guiding the evolution of our design system, specifying core principles in visual style, typography, spacing, motion, and interaction models, designing and deploying interaction patterns through components, documentation, and prototypes)
• Work closely with developers to ensure finished designs are code-ready and the developed output matches the design handoff; work with front-end developers to create components that meet and exceed accessibility standards

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Other peripheral responsibilities to the role include the following:

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• Turn user and market insights into feature designs that drive positive business outcomes by setting up lean experiments to validate underlying assumptions and hypotheses, resulting in the development of a final visual design and interaction model of your validated solutions
• Use data to inform your decisions and learning through experimentation, whilst being capable of challenging decisions which are detrimental to a user’s experience. As a proactive team member, you should love collaborating with the other disciplines to explore different solutions to problems
• Continually seek to understand the capabilities and technical constraints of the systems with which you’ll be developing and working

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About You

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• 7-10 years of relevant experience as a Product Designer or similar role
• Stellar end-to-end design skills with excellent attention to detail. Well-versed in visual and user experience design, illustration & animation
• Proficiency in building & shipping multiple products and features for consumer-facing products that are broad in scope and encompass an end-to-end experience across multiple platforms
• Strong understanding of how web and mobile applications work; experience working with native iOS and Android UI and following Apple Design guidelines.
• Competent with industry-standard software; strong knowledge of Figma, our design tool of choice, amongst others (Sketch, Miro, Adobe Suite, etc.)
• Proficiency in brand marketing, typography, desktop/mobile UI, colour, layout, iconography, aesthetic sense and how these elements impact product function
• Creativity, genuine excitement for building brilliant products and immersive experiences and a passion for designing craft

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Highly valued skills would be the following:

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• Interaction design experience with knowledge to define how an experience should behave based on understanding people's needs, plus consideration of how this product will scale. Ability to use appropriate prototyping tools to demonstrate how a particular flow or interaction will work
• Strategic product thinking with experience in developing product goals, identifying opportunities, and making decisions based on the impact on people and the company

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Nice to have skills would be:

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• Understanding of design best practices and ethics within a children's application, experience in the kids’ space 
• BA in interaction design, graphic design, product design, visual design, human-computer interaction, or equivalent professional experience

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Benefits and Perks

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Our client offers a growth opportunity at an industry-leading product that is changing the lives of millions of families around the world. The total rewards package is based on experience and is competitive to the industry and level. You will also have the chance to work with a passionate, collaborative and fun team!

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• Share options
• Private Medical Insurance 
• Enhanced pay for family policies 
• £100 book allowance per year
• Cycle to work scheme
• Hybrid approach – work either from home or from our client’s office in London
• WFH equipment support

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About Us

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At Haptic, we know that people-first recruitment is fundamental to our success. We work closely with talented candidates and innovative studios to offer the best opportunities and build the most promising teams.

Operating on the belief that a studio’s strength comes from the team they build to bring their ideas to life, we are committed to assembling the most talented, diverse game makers.

As part of this pledge, whenever you apply for a job with us, one of our specialist recruiters will support you through each stage. From introductions and interviews to accepting an offer and submitting your resignation, we’re always here to help.

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