User Experience Architect (Mid-Level)

Company: National Geospatial Intelligence Agency
Location: Brookeville
Posted on: February 16, 2020

Job Description:

Cover Letter

Applicants are not required to submit a cover letter. The entire cover letter cannot exceed the specified limits provided in the Cover Letter field (3,000 characters). Pages exceeding this limit will not be considered. The cover letter is recommended but is not required for employment consideration with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Applicants should place their narrative information in the Cover Letter / Other Professional Details field.

Pay, Benefits, & Work Schedule

PROMOTION OPPORTUNITY: Promotion opportunities allow applicants at all band levels to be considered. Qualifications for NGA positions do not include specific time-in-band requirements. NGA will emphasize quality of experience, rather than duration, and assess how the quality of the experience demonstrates possession of the knowledge, skills, abilities, and competencies necessary for successful job performance in the NGA occupational structure.

Band 03 $64,948 - $133,465

PERMANENT CHANGE IN STATION: PCS expenses are not authorized.

Pay is only part of the compensation you will earn working for the Federal Government. We offer a broad array of benefits programs and family friendly flexibilities to meet the needs of you and your family.

For more information on the array of benefits programs, please visit

Position Summary

ASSIGNMENT DESCRIPTION: Visual Information Specialists design, produce, and finish static visual presentation products. They apply broad knowledge of design principles to communicate concepts or ideas visually. They use visual communication software to generate hardcopy, softcopy, and web products, to include geospatial information products, publications, brochures, and web pages.

Additional Position Info

ASSIGNMENT DESCRIPTION: User Experience Architects apply user-centered design principles to build seamless, consistent, and desirable interfaces for NGA enterprise systems. They lead web-based design activities, including gathering, validating, analyzing, and defining requirements; conducting research and best practice reviews; performing user engagements and testing (e.g., interviews, site navigation); and creating prototypes. User Experience Architects create and plan interfaces that promote intuitive navigation and enhanced user workflow.

Additional Position Info

NGA is looking for strong, analytical, and creative user experience researchers and front-end web designers to fill User Experience (UX) Architect positions. UX Architects apply user-centered design principles to build seamless, consistent, and desirable interfaces for NGA's ecosystem of websites, applications, and products. They lead web-based design activities, including gathering, validating, analyzing, and defining requirements; conducting user research and heuristic reviews; performing user engagements and testing (e.g., interviews, usability testing, ethnographies); creating static and interactive prototypes; and applying research results to design and develop web-based interfaces. UX Architects plan and create interfaces that promote intuitive interactions and enhanced user workflow.

At NGA, UX Architects work collaboratively with other UX disciplines to drive and implement, research, design and development strategies. They interact daily across the entire UX team to understand and guide research needs (known and unknown) to ultimately produce informed interactive solutions. UX Architects work on overlapping projects, which requires the ability to multi-task and juggle competing priorities. The right candidate will have a deep understanding of UX methods and best practices, and also a nimble, creative and pragmatic approach to recommendations and solutions, while pushing the boundaries for better product experiences. UX practitioners at NGA are the champions for its consumers and help solve end-user pain points. They collect and use research data to better understand problems and opportunities. For this position, NGA is looking for experienced individual contributors who will help elevate the practice of user-centered design and research by applying creative but rigorous qualitative, quantitative, and/or design research methods.

Other duties may include:

* Build, prioritize, levy, track, review, and validate customer requirements and ensure they are documented and measurable.
* Apply knowledge of human abilities, limitations, and characteristics and application of human factors principles to the design of tools, systems, tasks, and environments for safe, comfortable, and effective human use.
* Conduct qualitative and quantitative research including user testing sessions, surveys, card sorts, interviews, diary studies, field studies, and ethnographies.
* Data Analysis derived from qualitative and quantitative research to provide recommendations to team members and stakeholders.
* Create documentation, including personas, empathy maps, journey maps, service blueprints, jobs-to-be-done maps, high-and low-fidelity prototypes, HTML etc.
* Design high- and low-fidelity concepts, interactive prototypes, or fully functional proofs-of-concepts.
* Create HTML, CSS, and JS developed design interfaces
* Evaluate software, tools, and technologies for future use, and analyze the potential impacts of new technologies. Identify technology trends and opportunities.
* Develop test and evaluation plans, design and conduct appropriate systems/software tests/evaluations, and document and distribute results.
* Arrange and conduct user reviews and tests to evaluate and improve user interfaces.
* onvey data, information, and analytical conclusions using a variety of visual tools, techniques, and methods.
* Design websites on multiple networks and modify website designs to meet changing customer needs.
* Design and test the look and feel of websites and web-enabled applications, ensuring appropriate user interactions are compliant with accessibility standards for web.
* Write code for front-end supporting full-stack development projects.

This position is eligible for an INCENTIVE: The selected candidates may be offered an incentive as part of the offer of employment, based on budget availability. To receive the incentive, the selected candidate must sign a service agreement depending on the approved amount or duration of the incentive. If the employee leaves before the end of the service agreement, the employee may be required to repay a pro rata share amount of the incentive to the government.

Additional Application Requirement: You may be asked to complete one or more assessments in addition to the application you submit on this website as part of your application to NGA. These assessments may include but are not limited to:

* Online questionnaires or assessments that require you to describe your job-related knowledge, skills, abilities, or other characteristics that are aligned with the mandatory and desirable qualifications of this job posting. The information you provide in the application you submit must support the response you provide to this questionnaire. You will receive an email to describe any additional assessments required. Please monitor your emails and complete any required assessments as soon as possible.

Mandatory Qualification Reqs

MANDATORY QUALIFICATION CRITERIA: For this particular job, applicants must meet all competencies reflected under the Mandatory Qualification Criteria to include education (if required). Online applications must demonstrate qualification by providing specific examples and associated results, in response to the announcement's mandatory criteria specified in this vacancy announcement:

* Demonstrated experience designing user-centered products and/or services or applying user-centered principles to web designs.
* Experience solving problems utilizing UX processes, methods and/or strategies such as, design thinking principles and processes or equivalent UX methods.
* Understanding of Human Factors (e.g. accessibility, empathy, or ergonomics).
* Demonstrated experience with data analysis derived from qualitative and/or quantitative research. (e.g. data analysis, surveys, web analytical tools, interviews , or user testing).

EDUCATION REQUIREMENT: A. Education: Bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university in Human-Computer Interaction, Information Science, User Experience Design, Interaction Design, Visual Communication Design, Computer Science, Statistics, or a degree that provided a minimum of 24 semester hours in one or more of the fields identified above and required the development or adaptation of applications, systems, or networks. -OR- B. Combination of Education and Experience: A minimum of 24 semester (36 quarter) hours of coursework in any area listed in option A, plus experience working in interactive design and user testing, full stack development, or a related field that demonstrates the ability to successfully perform the duties associated with this work. As a rule, every 30 semester (45 quarter) hours of coursework is equivalent to one year of experience. Candidates should show that their combination of education and experience totals 4 years. -OR- C. Experience: A minimum of 4 years of experience in interactive design and user testing, full stack development, or a related field that demonstrates the ability to successfully perform the duties associated with this work. -AND- IT-related experience demonstrating each of the four competencies: Attention to Detail, Customer Service, Oral Communication, and Problem Solving.

Highly Desired Skills

QUALIFICATION CRITERIA: In addition to the mandatory qualifications..... click apply for full job details

Keywords: National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, Washington DC , User Experience Architect (Mid-Level), Professions , Brookeville, DC