UX / UI Designer

UX / UI Designer

Position Summary
The UX/UI Designer owns the user experience for an operator application used in a national cyber defense command center supporting Critical Infrastructure, SLTT partners, and Federal Civilian agencies. The application spans multiple functional areas and user categories with varying responsibilities and entitlements. Users work full shifts, often under time pressure and across multiple displays, making information hierarchy, cognitive load management, consistency, and clear presentation of uncertain data central to this role.

Key Responsibilities

Application Experience Design
• Design coherent workflows across functional areas.
• Establish navigation and orientation so users understand location and context.
• Define how selection and context carry across areas.
• Set defaults, on‑demand elements, and intentional omissions.

Role- and Entitlement-Aware Design
• Design for multiple user categories with distinct responsibilities and permissions.
• Ensure entitlement-driven presentation is clear without creating uncertainty.
• Present actions so any constraints are explicit.

Sustained Use & Escalating Tempo
• Design for full-shift attention and high-tempo periods.
• Create status, alerting, and priority encoding that conveys urgency without fatigue.
• Define degraded, stale, empty, and error states to make data currency obvious.
• Manage cognitive load using density, grouping, disclosure, and restrained color/motion.

Presenting Derived & Uncertain Information
• Present system-generated output with supporting evidence for user evaluation.
• Establish consistent visual language for confidence, source, and currency.
• Design interactions for accepting, rejecting, modifying, or escalating recommendations.

Design System & Consistency
• Create and maintain the design system and shared component library.
• Preserve consistent terminology, iconography, status encoding, and interaction patterns.
• Document decisions so they persist through personnel changes.

Accessibility & Display Environment
• Design to Section 508 and WCAG from the outset.
• Support legibility on individual workstations and large shared displays.
• Address workflows spanning multiple simultaneous displays.
• Provide non-visual equivalents when needed.
• Maintain required training and certifications, reported monthly.

Research, Validation & Handoff
• Work directly with users to understand workflows and pain points.
• Validate design decisions through observed use.
• Deliver specifications and behavior definitions engineers can build without guessing.
• Partner with front-end and visualization engineers through implementation and sprints.

Required Qualifications
• Experience designing complex, data-dense operational applications.
• Experience with multi-area applications used by multiple user categories.
• Demonstrated ability to manage information hierarchy and cognitive load in time‑pressured environments.
• Experience designing role- or permission-driven interfaces.
• Experience establishing and maintaining a design system.
• Demonstrated Section 508 and WCAG conformance.
• Experience conducting user research and workflow validation.
• Experience collaborating directly with engineers through implementation.
• Portfolio including operational or monitoring interfaces.
• Bachelor’s degree in design, human factors, HCI, or related field, and 5 years of experience (or equivalent experience per company policy).
• Public Trust eligibility and U.S. citizenship.
• On-site work at a government facility in the Washington, D.C. metro area (not remote/hybrid).

Preferred Qualifications
• Experience designing for operations centers or sustained-attention environments.
• Experience with multi-display workstations and large shared displays.
• Experience presenting automated or algorithmic output for human evaluation.
• Experience designing interfaces that adapt during escalation.
• Background in human factors.
• IAAP CPACC or WAS certification.
• Front-end familiarity sufficient for realistic specification.