DIRECTOR User Experience and Design

San Francisc, CA

Director User Experience and Design-Games and Metacritic

The Director User Experience and Design has three core functions:

• Design team leader
• User experience design lead
• User advocate, leveraging user research methodologies and techniques to identify who our users are, and how to build products that meets their needs.

The role will direct a team focused on creating compelling experiences that balance user intent, business needs, and site performance. In addition, the role will lead and develop the user experience design function at CBS Interactive’s Games & Metacritic group, playing a strategic role in aligning the roadmap with the market needs, creating elegant and balanced solutions within the constraints of a complex technical framework.

The position requires exceptional leadership, relationship and consensus building skills, and a proven ability to think strategically in a rapidly evolving environment. The successful candidate will be a driven self- starter obsessed with growth, problem solving and building truly remarkable product experiences, have his/her ego in check, and thrive in a fast paced, fast thinking, rapid execution environment.

The product ingredients are varied and we’re focused on innovating around both social and content experiences. Our games sites are GameSpot and GameFAQs—which deliver market-leading news, reviews, and game help for video games as well as a highly developed community and growing social network—plus Metacritic, which aggregates review scores for movies, games, music, and TV shows.

Role and responsibilities:

•  Lead the customer-centric vision, strategy, and execution of the user experience design
• Advocate a vision for new interaction models designed for simplicity and discoverability to meet the needs of our user base.
• Work closely with Product Managers and Senior Management to align the product development strategy with target audience needs, brand positioning, revenue goals, and team resources
• Define and manage the user research plan and incorporate findings into the design process
• Optimize products by closely analyzing user engagement performance metrics and testing alternate design solutions
• Thought leadership by contributing subject matter expertise in the areas of information architecture, interaction design, visual design, user experience best practices, user research, and online user behavior.
• Promote customer- centric design and ensure usability considerations are in the front and center of product decisions.
• Create and foster a creative, positive, efficient and collaborative team working environment.
• Lead, mentor and guide a group of talented visual designers
•  Be able to interface at all levels of business, understand business objectives, and drive results with no instruction or supervision. The Director will be responsible and accountable to the VP Games and will work hand-in-hand with the Director of Product and VP Engineering as well as indirectly responsible and accountable to other product managers and peers within the organization.
• Build strong working relationships with coworkers, direct reports (if applicable), customers (internal and external), and company management
• Provide leadership and mentoring to employees in your reporting chain utilizing best practices as a people manager and organizational leader

• Established track record leading UX and design teams
• Leader with history of success working across organizational boundaries
• Ability to apply brand development via user experience and visual design (the intersection of Creative Director and UX Designer
• Ability to energize, lead and/or guide meetings
• Ability to manage as well as create user interface and user interaction design
• Managing and developing a team with varied, complementary skills
• Project management experience as it applies to design deliverables (familiarity with both Agile and plan-driven approaches required)
• Hands–on visual/art design
• Paper prototyping experience a plus.
• CSS/HTML skills a plus
• Javascript coding nice but not essential
• Passion for videogames and/or entertainment experience a big plus
• Must successfully pass a background check

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