Senior UX Researcher / Designer

About Agile Six

Agile Six is a people-first, remote-work company that serves shoulder-to-shoulder with federal agencies to find innovative, human-centered solutions. We build better by putting people first. We are animated by our core values of Purpose, Wholeness, Trust, Self-Management and Inclusion. We deliver our solutions in autonomous teams of self-managed professionals (no managers here!) who genuinely care about each other and the work. We know that’s our company’s purpose – and that we can only achieve it by supporting a culture where people feel valued, self-managed, and love to come to work.

The Role

Agile Six is looking for a Senior UX Researcher / Designer to join a cross-functional team working on VA.gov.

This Senior UX Researcher / Designer will have a breadth of UX knowledge with technical expertise in user research including discovery, synthesis, and documentation. This role entails collaborating with our team to design and implement highly complex, cross-disciplinary projects for government agencies and the people they serve, including context switching across a variety of products in our portfolio as required.

Among your responsibilities will be to communicate your research and design vision to both team members and key stakeholders. You have an adaptive, empathetic and collaborative mindset, and care deeply about team dynamics. Most importantly, you have a passion for working on important problems that have a lasting impact on millions of users and make a difference in our government!

Please note that this is a Key Personnel role, as stipulated by our contract, considered "essential to work performance". The resumes of Key Personnel are subject to government review and approval, and any changes to Key Personnel (such as voluntary or involuntary separation) may require government oversight.

Responsibilities

• Lead user research efforts across a variety of research methodologies such as user interviews, heuristic evaluations, generative research, tree testing, card sorting and design thinking workshops.
• Own the research process, including discovery, synthesis, documentation, and communication.
• Communicate potential costs and tradeoffs of different processes and research approaches while working with incomplete requirements.
• Stay up to date on emerging practices and technologies that support UX, and share these with the larger UX community at Agile Six when opportunities arise.
• Clearly articulate your thought processes through verbal and written explanation, whiteboard, sketching, or quick mock-ups to small or large groups.
• Create design deliverables at all levels of fidelity throughout the process, from early sketches to low fidelity wireframes to high fidelity prototypes.
• Use the VA Design System and design with repeatable patterns across the portfolio.
• Collaborate with the Design System team when necessary around iteration and improvement of design system components.
• Collaborate with the product manager and engineers to ensure implementation matches intent across all design components.
• Keep UX work in sync with the product roadmap and flag delays or issues in research and design.
• Collaboratively create and evolve user stories and acceptance criteria with the product owner and wider Scrum team.
• Work with team to identify and integrate AI-powered tools and services into the software design and development lifecycle to improve the efficiency and/or quality of UX deliverables and production code. Example services include, but are not limited to, Vercel V0, Dovetail, Figma AI tools and GitHub Copilot.
• Communicate and collaborate with stakeholders and team members across a range of disciplines.
• Support the practice of design and research within the larger company as needed through activities such as:
  • Assisting in outreach, recruitment, and hiring efforts
  • Occasionally participating in or otherwise supporting business development efforts, including code or design challenges, writing or reviewing proposal responses, etc.