Lead UX Designer

Company Description
**From global research discoveries to clinical breakthroughs - our vision is to become the most influential life sciences company for researchers. If you are motivated by making a real impact to people’s life and have a desire to work in a passionate and diverse community, Abcam is the place for you.**

Our culture is driven by our dedicated, agile and audacious community of professionals who are driven by a combined purpose and sense of belonging. We’re incredibly proud to be recognised as one of the top 5 best places to work in the UK for two years running, as per Glassdoor’s Employees’ Choice Award.

**Job Description**:
We're looking for a Lead UX Designer to join the UX and Digital Customer Team, working flexibly and out of our HQ based in Cambridge. The role will be focused on strategic digital transformation of our front-end customer experience. This includes the revisioning and re-platforming of the Abcam E-commerce website across multiple domains and regions, requiring an understanding of the drivers around current customer behavior and how this can be harnessed to create a web experience to meet future customer needs.

The role will support UX Designers embedded in parallel workstreams, to identify and develop processes that will enable us to improve the end-to-end customer journey at pace. Ability to influence and advance the understanding of UX operating as a cross-stream, product-led team, focusing on customer and business problems over assumption-based solutions. Design and support findings with research and data for a broad picture of customer needs and corresponding design solutions.

The role will lead on delivery of a design that represents an intuitive, customer-focused e-commerce experience across desktop and mobile. Working in a fast-paced and highly collaborative environment, where design value is delivered through agile sprints, the Lead UX Designer will lead on stakeholder end-of-sprint demos and be proactive in contributing to design planning and communications across the internal audience.

The role will undertake the integration of Design Operations as a discipline alongside UX Design, enabling both UX disciplines to deliver in tandem.

**Responsibilities**:

- Oversee a small team of UX Designers supported by and in tandem with the Head of UX, alongside other UX disciplines - aligning on ways of working across agile, sprints and Product Management
- Educate cross-functional stakeholders of digital approach through collaboration and delivery, leading on design thinking, discussion, and problem definition activities
- Simplify complex user journeys, utilizing and translating feedback from customers, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and stakeholders into business and customer-focused solutions
- Ability to lead on UX design, from low to hi-def wireframes, using collaborative design tools, creating prototypes with excellent attention to detail
- Support UX designers working in parallel workstreams that operate in a fast-paced agile environment, whilst understanding the importance of timely delivery
- Experience with UX Design line management
- Experience using customer interviews, usability testing, and other research methods to inform design decisions, backed by data
- Where absent, work with research and data teams to source insights to support proposed design solutions
- Support a scalable approach to A/B and multivariant testing as part of the wider Digital Customer Team
- Demonstrate brand consistency, working with design systems and aligning design output to global guidelines. Working with counterparts in Consumer Marketing & Ecommerce to define a common understanding of campaign, visual, and user experience design, achieving design consistency across the on and offline experience
- Demonstrate the ability to identify and balance both customer and business goals, within design delivery
- Collaboration on sprint planning, leading on UX priorities and requirements with Product Managers and other members of the Digital Customer Team
- Empathizing with and representing the user during the design process
- Proactive by nature, identifying and proposing continuous improvement across current and new projects
- Contribute to the identification and support of key metrics across the Digital Customer Team
- Understand the need to balance user needs with business goals and technical capabilities
- Good understanding of code and can communicate with developers to convey UX led ideas
- An understanding that the design phase is only part of the process

**Qualifications**:

- Degree in UX Design, Interaction Design or related field
- Extensive UX Lead experience working on large e-commerce environments (or similar)
- Excellent communication skills to convey design ideas and requirements
- Management of activities and roles within UX Design & Operations - Setting activities, goals and supporting strategy to compliment those of UX and Product Teams
- Experience with im