Junior Product Designer job description

Product design — Junior Product Designer
Delivers well-scoped screens and flows with close guidance.

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Pick up an unfamiliar area fast enough to be useful in it.
- Moderate a usability session on your own, avoid leading the participant, and note where they hesitated or made an error.
- Design a short flow end to end, covering its main states and the paths a user takes through it, with review.
- Wireframe a screen or short flow from a rough brief, choosing a sensible layout and content hierarchy yourself.
- Compose a screen's visual hierarchy from a brief, choosing type, color and spacing that make the priority clear.
- Design a screen's states, including empty, loading, error and edge cases, at a fidelity ready for build.

REQUIREMENTS
- No earlier level needed: this is the first level of the ladder

REQUIRED SKILLS
Research
- User Research Planning — You can help set up a study someone else designed, such as scheduling sessions and preparing the discussion guide.
- Qualitative User Interviewing — You can sit in on an interview and take structured notes, and ask a follow-up question when invited to.
- Usability Testing — You can moderate a usability session on your own, avoid leading the participant, and note where they hesitated or made an error.
- Research Synthesis and Insight Reporting — You can tag and group the notes from a research session and pull out the points that keep recurring. A senior researcher checks your grouping before anything is shared with the team.
- Competitive and Comparative Analysis — You can collect how a handful of named products handle one screen or flow and lay the differences out clearly. Someone more senior tells you which products to look at and what to look for.

Structure & Flow
- Information Architecture — You can sort a small set of content or features into groups that make sense, with someone checking your grouping.
- Interaction and Flow Design — You can design a short flow end to end, covering its main states and the paths a user takes through it, with review.
- User Journey Mapping — You can write out the steps of a simple task and mark where the user moves from one channel to another. A mentor checks your map against real evidence before it is used.
- Wireframing — You can wireframe a screen or short flow from a rough brief, choosing a sensible layout and content hierarchy yourself.
- Interactive Prototyping — You can wire up a simple click-through prototype linking screens together, following an existing pattern.

Visual & UI Design
- Visual Design — You can compose a screen's visual hierarchy from a brief, choosing type, color and spacing that make the priority clear.
- User Interface Design — You can design a screen's states, including empty, loading, error and edge cases, at a fidelity ready for build.
- Design Systems and Component Libraries — You can use existing components from the design system correctly, and flag when one does not fit a screen you are designing.
- Responsive and Adaptive Layout — You can design a screen that holds at your project's breakpoints and at 200% text size, and check touch targets on a real device.

Accessibility
- Accessible Interface Design — You can check a design's contrast and text size with a tool and fix what it flags.
- Inclusive Design Practice — You can apply the inclusion rules you have been given and flag a design that shuts people out.
- Assistive Technology Evaluation — You can move through a prototype using only the keyboard and report where focus disappears or a control cannot be reached. Someone more experienced helps you judge what your findings mean.

Content & Handover
- UX Writing and Content Design — You can write a label or a short message following an existing style guide and glossary.
- Design Critique Facilitation — You can take part in a critique and give feedback on a specific part of a design rather than a general reaction. You ask what problem the designer was solving before offering an opinion.
- Design Rationale and Storytelling — You can explain the thinking behind your own design in a review and point to the research or constraint that led to it. A mentor helps you prepare what to say beforehand.
- Engineering Handover and Specification — You can hand over a feature with its states, spacing, assets and its empty and error cases documented. You stay reachable while it is built instead of moving straight to the next piece of work.
- Design QA During Build — You can review an in-progress build against the design across its main states, raise clear tickets with screenshots and steps, and check the fixes rather than assuming they landed.

Design Leadership
- Design Strategy — You can explain how your current design work supports your team's goals, with a mentor helping you link it to the organization's strategy.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can keep your own tasks and deadlines in a current to-do list, and tell your manager as soon as work you own will be late.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate how long a task will take once the approach is clear, and you say promptly when the estimate turns out to be wrong.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can stay responsible after you hand work over: you check it did what it was meant to, fix your own mistakes, and give updates before anyone asks.
- Quality Focus — You can choose checks that suit the task in front of you, catch your own mistakes before anyone else sees them, and confirm the result works once people start using it.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can work out what is wrong in work you did not create, and you fix the underlying cause instead of working around the symptom.
- Domain Expertise — You can apply the basics of your field to the work you are given, and ask an expert when a task goes beyond what you have learned.
- Continuous Learning — You can pick up an unfamiliar area fast enough to be useful in it, and you turn what you learned into something others can reuse.

Communication
- Communication — You can explain your work so your team can act on it, and play a request back in your own words before you act on it.
- Collaboration — You can work well with people in other roles, share context and credit, and take criticism of your work without defending territory.
- Writing & Documentation — You can document your own work well enough for a colleague to follow it unaided, such as a how-to guide or a handover, and keep it current as things change.
- Stakeholder Management — You can keep your manager and immediate team informed of your progress, and you raise an issue before someone else discovers it.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can act on direction well, seek feedback on how you work, and be open about what you need help with.
- Mentoring — You can share what you have just learned with your peers and help a newer colleague find their way around.
- Strategic Thinking — You can explain why the work you were given matters and who it is for.