Senior User Experience Designer - Software

If you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career.

Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

The salary range for this position takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.

At WGU, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their position, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is:
 

Grade: Technical 408

Pay Range: $116,000.00 - $174,100.00

Job Description

The Senior User Experience Designer-Software is a key member of the design team and may work on both desktop and mobile platforms (native Android and iOS) and works not only on certain projects but possibly a domain or domains. This is a position of product leadership and partners with Product Managers, PMs, and Engineers, providing insight and solutions to structuring and delivering work.

 

Senior User Experience Designer

Position summary
As a Senior User Experience Designer at Western Governors University (WGU), you will help shape the next generation of our student experience. You will play a key role on the team behind our New Student Platform portal, designing intuitive, data‑informed experiences that make online learning smoother, clearer, and more empowering for working adult learners.

 

You will think strategically about complex problems across the student journey, then translate those insights into practical short‑ and long‑term UX solutions. In this role, you will collaborate closely with product, engineering, research, and stakeholders across the university to set UX “guardrails” and patterns that other teams rely on, while still rolling up your sleeves to design and iterate on high‑impact experiences in our own product space.

About the team

You will join WGU’s User Experience organization, which brings together four disciplines: user experience research, user experience design, user interface design, and accessibility. The team’s mission is to define the standards, guidelines, and design systems that other business units use in their product spaces, while also owning and advancing core experiences like the New Student Platform portal. The team culture is highly collaborative and supportive, with a “work family” feel that emphasizes mentoring, sharing feedback, and helping each other grow while always staying student‑obsessed.

What you’ll do

In this role, you will:

• Lead UX design for high‑impact, multi‑phase initiatives like WGU’s New Student Platform portal, designing experiences that connect multiple platforms into a cohesive student journey.
• Think strategically about ambiguous problems, framing them in terms of student and business outcomes, and proposing clear short‑ and long‑term UX solutions.
• Collaborate with product managers, engineers, UX researchers, and business stakeholders to define problems, run workshops, explore concepts, and drive alignment on user‑centered solutions.
• Create and evolve holistic design artifacts for product lines (not just single features), including flows, wireframes, prototypes, and annotations that help teams implement with clarity and confidence.
• Use qualitative and quantitative data, including design performance metrics and tools such as Pendo, to evaluate experiences, guide design decisions, and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Proactively surface risks and dependencies, manage expectations with partners, and take ownership of end goals across organizational boundaries.
• Mentor and influence other designers and non‑design partners by explaining the “why” behind UX decisions, modeling best practices, and contributing to shared standards and pa