Senior UX Designer

Travel is the best way to learn about the world, and our tours make it easy to get to the heart of a destination. As the world’s largest private education company, we draw on over 50 years of experience and a rich network of local Tour Directors, historians, and experts to create one-of-a-kind journeys for curious travelers. Each trip offers the perfect balance of carefully planned activities and free time to explore your interests, so you’ll return home with memories that last a lifetime.   

The global Tours Engineering team is made up of talented software engineers, product managers, and creative professionals who solve our complex business problems across a suite of leading consumer-based student and adult tour operators.  

As a Senior UX Designer on the Operations team, you will work closely with Engineering and business stakeholders to build (from the ground up) the design and user workflow for our new operations system. You will leverage your knowledge in design thinking and user-centered design to address user pain points and business needs while accounting for technical feasibility. You crave the challenge of reconciling complex user workflows with even more complex business process to find opportunities to improve usability and efficiency across an ecosystem of applications. 

You should be comfortable giving presentations to stakeholders, facilitating workshops and collaborative brainstorming sessions, breaking down complex requirements and user journeys, compiling higher level generative research, and creating the building blocks for a successful project. This should include personas, low and high-fidelity wireframes, customer journey maps, user flow diagrams, and prototypes or whatever other methods you have in your UX toolkit. 

What you’ll do 

• Own the end-to-end workflows for a brand new way of building educational experiences  and defining the screens and business processes that will make it possible. 
• Partner with the business and internal customers (people who source, build, and produce educational tours) to discover how technology can better enable their work. This means being able to match the appropriate research method to the task at hand and sharing out key insights in actionable ways.  
• Design for high level long term business goals and nitty gritty usability details with equal passion. 
• Create in-scope solutions, and understand how the timeliness, feasibility, and complexity of your work impacts deadlines 
• Communicate the thought-process behind your work, address feedback in a solutions-oriented manner, and understand which problems/opportunities deserve a Cadillac versus when a skateboard will do. 
• Embrace the unknown and apply the minimum amount of structure needed to enable success, regardless of pressure or moments of pivot 
• Work within a branded component library as much as possible in your designs and collaborate with our User Interface Designer on new patterns/elements where appropriate. 

Who you are 

• 5+ years professional experience as a UX Designer with a preference for experience in Service Design and/or Enterprise product complexity 
• Knowledge of user-centered methodologies and design thinking 
• Hands on experience conducting user research sessions such as user interviews, a/b testing, user testing and other qualitative practices 
• Experience working side by side with a team of Product Managers, Engineers and other key stakeholders at all levels 
• Ability to design simple, usable experiences that scale across a complex suite of products 
• Understanding of opportunities and constraints of multiple platforms (web, smartphone, tablet)  

Ideal skills & expertise 

• Experience working on an enterprise-level product 
• Degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Human Factors, Design, or related field, preferred. 
• Highly motivated, self-starter 
• Ability to think creatively and analytically 
• Comfortable presenting ideas both formally and informally 
• Strong visual problem solver 
• Solid understanding of interactive design 

What this role is NOT 

• This role is NOT a Visual or UI Designer. You will have access to libraries created by our teams that do that! 
• Handing off your designs and never touching them again. We follow through from initial concepts through first release onward. 

About EF Education First 

At EF we believe that the world is better when people try to understand one another. Since 1965, we have helped millions of people see new places, experience new cultures, and learn new things about the world and about themselves. Our culturally immersive education programs—focused on language, travel, cultural exchange, and academics—turn dreams into international opportunities.  

When you join EF, you join a multicultural and diverse community working across more than 600 schools and offices in 50 countries, all with one shared mission of opening the world through education. Whoever you are, whatever you are passionate about—we welcome you and want you to bring that to work every day. EF is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and we are committed to inclusion and belonging across race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, parental status, identity, experience, and everything else that makes you unique.  

Founded in Sweden in 1965, EF has school and offices around the world, including hubs in Boston, London, Mexico City, São Paulo, Shanghai, Stockholm, Zürich, and more. Learn more at https://ef.com.