Senior UX Designer, Data Products

How You’ll Contribute

The Senior UX/Service Designer plays a strategic user experience and service designer role and focus on improving the end-to-end journey for both our staff and technical users across a portfolio of internal systems, integrations, and third-party platforms. This role plays an important role in bringing this vision to life, leading current and future digital initiatives at the Society, and has the power to amplify National Geographic’s impact through value-based product delivery, transformational data services, and world-class support and infrastructure services.

This role is not centered on traditional interface (UI) design. Instead, you will be the expert responsible for applying systems thinking and service design methodology to complex operational challenges, primarily concerning developer experience (DX), third-party software implementations (including Salesforce), and cross-system integrations. This also includes addressing content management challenges woven into the user experiences we work on, as several services and systems touch content production use cases.

Your primary responsibility will be to act as the strategic user advocate, making informed, high-impact recommendations on resource investment. You will determine where the out-of-the-box (OOTB) user experience from a vendor is sufficient to meet core user needs and, critically, when the cost and effort of building a custom interface or solution is necessary and justified by a clear gain in user value and organizational efficiency. You will also collaborate with a team of UX designers who work on the end-user experiences that are shipped out into the world, which are affected by the internal users and content production processes.

Your Impact

Please note that submission of a cover letter is required. Please include links to your portfolio.

Key Responsibilities

• Strategic Investment Decision-Making (10%): Conduct strategic analysis and user research to inform "build vs. configure vs. buy" decisions, providing clear, data-backed recommendations to product and engineering leadership on when to invest in custom solutions. This includes planning projects using multiple user-centered approaches to understanding user contexts, problems, and current approaches to outcomes.

• Service & System Mapping (20%): Lead the creation of Service Blueprints and System Interaction Diagrams to visualize complex user journeys across multiple integrated systems, identifying points of friction in both the staff and technical workflows, including those related to content production. This also involves documenting processes, guidelines, and best practices that emerge from this work.

• Developer Experience (DX) Improvement (20%): Partner with Engineering teams to research, define, and design improvements to internal tooling, documentation, APIs, and overall technical onboarding/usage flows for developers. This includes collaborating with Product Designers and Engineers to create world-class prototypes, web apps, and digital products.

• Third-Party Configuration UX (20%): Deeply understand the user experience inherent in third-party platforms, especially Salesforce. Design how to best configure and leverage existing vendor interfaces, platform data models, and declarative tools (like Salesforce Flows), ensuring minimal friction and maximum value with OOTB tools, particularly in the context of content management.

• Information Architecture (IA) (15%): Drive IA strategy for a portfolio of data products and integrated systems, focusing on governance, discoverability, and accessibility of information and services across the enterprise, with a strong emphasis on content architecture.

• Strategic Research (15%): Employ a mix of quantitative and qualitative research methods, including interviewing and usability testing, to understand the needs of data-focused and technical users, including those involved in content production. Report on insights gained through testing for current and future product designs. Keep up with current trends and best practices in the marketplace through conferences, readings, and videos, building a practice of UX design Excellence at the National Geographic Society.

What You’ll Bring

Educational Background

 Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in the humanities with a specialization in systems design, UX, HCI, or information science.  

Minimum Years and Type of Experience   

7+ years of experience with solid understanding of data products