Senior UX Designer/Researcher for Technical Wishes Team

At Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. we help create, collect, and distribute free knowledge.

In 2004, volunteer Wikipedia activists founded the non-profit association Wikimedia Deutschland in Berlin, which now consists of over 100,000 members and 160 full-time staff.

Free knowledge leads to a fairer world. Wikipedia is the most important online knowledge collection of our time. The German Wikipedia alone records almost 1 billion page views per month for a total of 2.6 million articles. We - Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. - support the volunteers of Wikipedia and its sister projects, develop free software, such as Wikidata, and advocate for free access to knowledge, the opening of education and research, and more common good orientation in data policy.

For our UX Team, based in Berlin, we are looking for a Senior UX Designer/Researcher (m/w/d) (permanent contract), full-time or part-time, as soon as possible.

About the position & the team:

We are looking for a Senior UX Designer and Researcher for the Technical Wishes team (m/f/d) to join our Software Development Department in the heart of Berlin. 

Technical Wishes / Technische Wünsche is a joint project of the german-speaking Wikipedia community and the Software Development Department at Wikimedia Deutschland. Our goals are to make it easier to contribute by improving MediaWiki, the software which powers Wikipedia, and to do this in a collaborative, community-centered way. 

This role will focus on doing user research in a worldwide community and developing user interface improvements for millions of users across Wikipedia and its sister projects. 

The role will report to the Head of Design and is part of the UX & Design team. 

What you will be doing:

• You are responsible for planning UX research activities in the Technical Wishes team, aligning your research plans with the product strategy, all in close collaboration and with support from your teams.
• You will perform user research to understand user behaviors, pain points, needs, and aspirations in our community, and deliver actionable insights through stories, customer journey maps, scenarios, and flows. 
• You will center the community of users and editors in your work, finding frequent opportunities to include them with participatory methods throughout the product development cycle.
• You will distill complex concepts into easy-to-understand designs and prototypes, and validate them through design reviews and usability testing.
• You will follow system guidelines to create high-fidelity UI designs and handover specifications for developers.

What makes you right for this role: 

• You have experience with qualitative research methods, such as planning and conducting usability tests, interviews, surveys, desk research, and conducting workshops.
• You have experience in defining use cases and workflows. You are able to design interactions and interfaces that are usable and useful for all users, regardless of their background or abilities, and follow industry best practices.
• You have experience with or interest in participatory and co-design practices.
• You have experience working in a cross-functional team with e.g., product managers, UX designers, community communication managers, and engineers, in an agile environment.
• You are comfortable using verbal, written and visual communication skills to share your research and design work to relevant stakeholders inside and outside the project.
• You can communicate in English on a professional level.
• You have experience speaking German or are interested in learning (minimum B1). 

What we offer:

• A participative collaboration guided by our values: participation, diversity, free and open access, equity, sustainability and respectful collaboration
• Benefits: 30 vacation days (25 for working students) and additional time off on Dec. 24th and New Year's Eve, public transport ticket, access to our company pension scheme allowance, continued salary in the event of sick children
• All overtime is recorded and converted into compensatory time off
• An office located in the center of Berlin and hybrid work options
• In-house training and continued professional development as well as free external life coaching (professional advice and coaching on job-related and private issues)