SIMULIA R&D Senior User Experience Designer- Hybrid or Remote

Imagine New Horizons…

Help us design realistic simulation software that is used by physical product designers and engineers to explore and optimize the real-world behavior of their products before committing to physical prototypes. They leverage high-performance computing to improve the sustainability, performance, reliability and safety of products in a wide variety of industries including aerospace, automotive, consumer electronics, clean energy, and healthcare. As a Senior UX Designer in the SIMULIA UX team, you will be responsible for leading UX research and design for a suite of engineering simulation software applications.

• With  the support of our UX Research Lead, you will build an effective and efficient continuous learning process, establishing a feedback loop between the product team and users that will identify the right problems to solve as well as how to build the solutions right. You will plan and conduct both qualitative and quantitative research (such as contextual inquiry interviews, usability studies, surveys, card sorting, etc.) based on project needs and make a plan for integrating research into the team’s development process, understanding that research doesn't have to be perfect and can be improved over time. You can expect to spend about a third to half of your time on UX research.
• Based on the understanding of the problems to solve and opportunities identified in UX research, you will work with key stakeholders to define the experience vision, including long-term user outcomes and success criteria, as well as a user-centered (rather than feature & technology-centered) product roadmap and progress metrics to ensure that incremental value is delivered to users in each product release.
• Based on your experience with what works to inspire a product team to be user-focused, you’ll introduce UX techniques to improve current processes and will freely share your knowledge of UX methodologies and best practices to help your colleagues build their skills through practice.
• Given our users’ unstructured goals, nonlinear and variable workflows, and the need to work with multiple applications, a major focus of your work will be to research and define user flows to ensure that the overall experience is as efficient and friction-free as possible.
• You will use proven Information Architecture methods to organize information within the apps so that users can efficiently analyze and make decisions based on the large quantities of complex technical data their simulations produce. You will include non-UX stakeholders from the product team in defining the IA to improve their awareness of good & poor IA, help them see the value of good IA on the consistency and quality of the design, and to build their IA skills.
• You will create wireframes and medium-fidelity mockups of the UI as needed to communicate the design vision.
• You’ll work with technical writers to define and review user assistance: to use our applications, there is generally extensive training required and a lengthy implementation & onboarding process, so user assistance (everything from tooltips and UI labels to online documentation and real-world example problems) is an important part of our users’ experience.
• An important part of your job is to identify overlaps and opportunities for knowledge sharing and collaboration. You’ll remain aware of other projects, communicate proactively, and connect the dots between your work and other projects that R&D is working on.

We will consider remote candidates. If you live near a DS office, we are following a hybrid model of 3 days in the office and 2 days from home. Working location is flexible within the United States: we are open to any Dassault Systèmes office location. The SIMULIA R&D development teams are primarily located in Johnston, RI; Waltham, MA; Cincinnati, OH; and Woodland Hills, CA.

What will your role be?

You will be a member of a highly collaborative UX team whose members support each other on their projects as well as participate with colleagues around the world in cross-brand UX initiatives.

• You will be working for a large global organization with multiple brands dedicated to creating software applications for engineering, 3D modeling, manufacturing, and collaboration. The SIMULIA UX team works with highly educated and talented colleagues worldwide, including our UX counterparts in other brands like SOLIDWORKS, CATIA, ENOVIA, and DELMIA. Our products (and therefore product teams) focus on different functionality yet they are interrelated in supporting user work. UX research and design processes must account for this as well as remote work, time zone differences, development teams with varying levels of UX maturity, and the UX team's level of research & design skills.
• The nature of our work is highly complex: as a reference, it includes all five layers of complexity described in the NN/g complex application design framework. We are looking for a new team member who has experience working on enterprise software and technology that is similarly complex, so that you can ramp up quickly and hold your own in our technology-driven company.
• We’d like you to help us systematically quantify & track the impact of UX research and design on business objectives. We have introduced journey mapping into our organization, but have much work to do to incorporate these and user-focused metrics as a driving force in our product development planning.
• You’ll contribute regularly to design critiques, leading by example and sharing best practices on delivering critique. We are trying to improve, so you can help us improve quality of our design critiques with regular direct, succinct, and kind feedback on our critiquing skills. Over time, we would like to expand critique to more stakeholders outside the UX team.
• You will have the opportunity to propose improvements to our processes and tools to help us standardize and measure our UX work and outcomes.
• In everything you do, you will contribute to improving the UX maturity of our brand and the company. We are at ~level 3 of UX maturity on the NN/g scale and are making conscious efforts to be better. Our goal is to empower product teams by continuously sharing our decision-making rationale, UX principles, methods, and tools. We think it would also help if we improve communication of UX work by publicly recognizing product teams’ UX successes.

Your Challenges Ahead-

Engineers and designers use our simulation software in complex, collaborative engineering workflows that typically span weeks or months. They solve engineering design and manufacturing problems, explore design alternatives to improve their products, and imagine innovative solutions in a wide variety of industries. Our R&D teams are technology-driven, which our highly skilled users appreciate: our UX challenge is to reduce the friction and inefficiencies in our users’ end-to-end workflows.

There is a steep learning curve in the mechanical engineering and simulation domain, but you will interact with and learn from our Subject Matter Experts in the company while building great relationships. In return, you’ll learn about a wide variety of interesting engineering challenges involving realistic simulation of structural, fluid, electromagnetic, acoustic, and motion behavior, as well as optimization and design exploration techniques that help our users explore and understand their products virtually so they can improve the real world. You will build a working knowledge of our simulation software and work with a highly educated and talented team of designers and product teams to improve the power and usability of our SIMULIA applications.