Job Description
User Experience / Interaction Designer March 2012
Atomic Software, Inc.

User Experience / Interaction Designer

About Atomic Software
Atomic is a Brooklyn-based firm that makes digital products for the book publishing industry. We have a twelve-year track record of creating elegant technology for some of the largest media companies in the world. Our clients include Random House, Scholastic, Harcourt, and Pearson. Our products directly affect the future of an industry that is becoming digital right now.

The Position
Atomic is building a team of innovative design thinkers, who can invent, spec, design, prototype, and build the front-end of great digital products. Your focus at Atomic will be on how users experience our products: What should this product do? How should it feel? Why would someone love to use this product? Weʼre looking for people who have a vision of the whole product: great design sensibilities, a keen interest in communicating user-centered design principles to technologists and business managers, some hands-on experience building digital products, and an interest in working closely with programming staff to co-develop great digital products. You should also be interested in how authors, editors, publishers, and readers will be creating, selling, contributing to, and enjoying
books in years to come.

User Experience Design Skills
You should be able to:
• Define, design, and communicate a clear vision of what a product will look like, feel like, and act like.
• Engage with clients, end users, and management to understand clearly what they want a product to be.
• Draw on a detailed knowledge of user-centered design practices, including user-experience and service-design practices.
• Create visual wireframes, mock-ups, and fast prototypes to understand and communicate how a user would accomplish a series of tasks, and how those tasks fit into a larger information architecture.
• Possess a sophisticated sense of design style and impeccable design fundamentals for type, image, and color.
• Quickly sketch a series of related screens while sitting with a client.
• Communicate a vision for how a static visual design will translate to an interactive, customerfriendly product.
• Take pride in producing an interface that is beautiful and consistent, delightful and efficient.

Technical Skills
Weʼd like it if you knew how to:
• Work with Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and Fireworks to bring wireframes to life and with tools like Balsamiq Mockups for simple mock-ups.
• Take a design even further by implementing interaction, using tools like Adobe Dreamweaver, HTML5, Apple Xcode, and Adobe Catalyst.
• Understand what will be required to implement a design as the interface to the product.
• Communicate closely with technical software engineers about how the interface will work and make adjustments based on technical requirements.
• Design many kinds of product interfaces: desktop application, browser, mobile, tablet, print, interactive whiteboard, video games, ebook readers, and any other medium we can throw a book at.

Conceptual Skills
You must be able to:
• Combine design expertise with the ability to speak your mind, think critically, and find the simpler, more elegant way to get the job done.
• Take pride in your work and be able to explain to anyone — client, lay-person, engineer, or executive — exactly why it’s great.
• Recognize when you could have done a better job and take action to improve things.
• Listen to the end-user or client thoughtfully, address the userʼs concerns, and communicate what courses of action are available or preferred.

These conceptual skills are not after-thoughts: we consider them as much part of the job description as any of the design or engineering skills listed above.

To Apply
Send a resume and cover letter to ajyoung@atomicsoftware.com with the subject line “User Experience / Interaction Designer”. Include a link to a digital portfolio.