Purpose of the Role:
Venere.com is looking to hire an Interaction Designer to join our team on a full time basis. The role will work within the Venere.com User Experience team to distill user research and business objectives/requirements into functional and interface specifications/prototypes. The User Experience Designer will work with a cross-functional team of product managers, business analysts, visual designers, design technologists and developers to produce compelling and fun experiences for our customers! This role will report to the Head of User Experience.

All candidates must provide examples of work with CVs demonstrating an ability to distill knowledge, generate ideas, problem solve and arrive at a solution effectively. You will have seen projects from start to end (no design and run, please) and be able to defend your designs with business metrics or user-derived quantitative / qualitative data.

Key Areas of Responsibility:

• Collaborate with the team to design great user experiences/interfaces for the Venere.com websites and related products.
• Lead brainstorming activities as needed.
• Define, categorize, and organize content

• Create multiple solutions to a single design problem and iterate to a single (or so) final design

• Create specification as needed.
  Currently includes: site maps, flow diagrams, state transition diagrams, wireframes, and interactive prototypes

• Improve and document current working practices, products and technologies

• Coordinate or execute user research efforts (interviews, usability testing, surveys, etc.) as needed.
  If you have the skills to conduct design research, great! If not, you need to know how to use it to drive/validate your design process

• Contribute to the creation of the product roadmap
  Provide insights on where user needs are not being met at the feature level
  Provide recommendations on ongoing product strategy based on qualitative and quantitative data

• Prepare and share project/design presentations to the extended Expedia organization
  Rationalize design decisions to stakeholders and peers (You did collaborate and share your designs with the team first, right?)

• Assist in establishing information design standards for projects and ongoing enhancements to the Hotels.com EMEA websites

Skills and Experience:

• Masters degree or equivalent experience, specializing in design, library sciences, human-computer interaction, ergonomics, computer science or cognitive psychology.

• 3+ years of experience in online interaction design or information architecture, preferably e-commerce.

• Outstanding conceptual design skills. Expected outputs are sitemaps, storyboards, scenarios, personas, flow diagrams, user journeys, user stories, comics, wireframes, low and hi (interactivity) functionality prototypes, content models, user interface specification (state transition diagrams, error validation rules)

• Knowledge of statistical data analysis

• Understanding of the product lifecycle (Evaluation/Requirements gathering, specification/design, implementation) and its deliverables

• Familiar with HTML/CSS

• Technical grounding in a range of Internet tools and their application.
  Mandatory to be skilled in the following technologies:
  One or more of Visio, Illustrator, Axure RP
  Microsoft Office
  Optional:
  Photoshop
  Morae

• Execute usability best practices and user interface web standards

• Understanding of web accessibility (W3C WCAG)
• Enthusiasm for IxD, UX, and IA
• Amazing attention to detail

-Fluent in both italian and English.

Candidates with agile (SCRUM) experience with be given higher consideration
Cross-disciplined candidates (IxD with project management, business systems analysis, design research, visual design, design technology and information architecture) will be given higher consideration.