WHAT DOES A DESIGN LEADER DO?
Published: Oct 17, 2024 - The Design Leader ensures compliance with processes, collaborates with cross-functional teams for timely IMDS/CAMDS release, and supports managers in meeting goals. Leads a design team, driving improvements in user experience through testing, research, and strategic planning. Develops UI concepts, collaborates on web and app design, and provides digital support for marketing campaigns.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Design Leader
1. Design Leader Duties
- Interaction & Visual Design: Interaction and visual design, along with user insights and strategic thinking.
- Collaboration: Working collaboratively with experience designers, client stakeholders, and technology teams.
- Digital Solutions Design: Translate complex user needs and business goals into intuitive, elegant, and innovative digital solutions.
- Brand-Consistent Design: Creating pixel-level designs that are consistent with client's brands.
- Design Language Ownership: Owning the design language and design direction and working with clients to create standards and best practices.
- Brand Consistency: Ensuring that the visual design language and final solutions are on-brand and have been consistently translated in build.
- Stakeholder Communication: Communicating design ideas to stakeholders and technology teams and distilling feedback.
- Experience Design Activities: Participating in experience design activities such as user research, client workshops, and high-level product strategy conversations.
- Project Planning: Scoping and planning experience design projects with the Head of Experience Design.
- Hands-on Design & Research: Hands-on with design as well as conducting user research.
2. Design Leader Details
- Ad Design: Design/art direct ads that help build awareness of product benefits and drive customer acquisition.
- Social Media Content Creation: Develop and produce engaging content for specific social media platforms.
- Multimedia Production: Create short-form videos, GIFs, and animations.
- Creative Product Management: Manage visual oversight of creative products from inception through completion.
- Quality Assurance: Ensure a high level of quality and integrity of concepts through approval of the idea.
- Creative Concept Development: Develop and frame creative concepts in line with creative briefs.
- User Experience Design: Visualize, design, and conceptualize user experience.
- Prototype Creation: Create visual prototypes.
- Brand Extension: Extend brand guidelines across all mediums.
3. Design Leader Responsibilities
- Landscape Analysis: Lead landscape analyses, assessments, and country-specific Inclusive Development Analyses, which examine an entire country’s development program context.
- Project Design Support: Assist Missions and OUs with project design and/or activity amendment documents that incorporate recommendations from ID analyses and evaluations.
- Co-creation Facilitation: Convene and facilitate co-creation activities, including the drafting of planning documents and soliciting feedback at each step of the co-creation process.
- Inclusion Advocacy: Ensure that marginalized and underrepresented groups, as well as those in vulnerable situations, will have a voice in the activity design.
- Team Management: Manage creative/design teams, including staff planning, hiring, and performance management.
- Feedback Utilization: Seek critique of work and ideas as opportunities for improvement.
- Attention to Detail: See the big picture and sweat the details.
- Stakeholder Management: Manage stakeholders across all levels to create and maintain valuable business relationships and hold and sell creative ideas internally.
- Remote Collaboration: Work and collaborate with remote team members.
- Product Experience Design: Design and ship product experiences for international audiences.
- Drawing Review: Review drawings to ensure compliance with specifications and standards.
4. Design Leader Job Summary
- Process Compliance: Compliance with process and requirements.
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Work with cross-functional teams to issue and release IMDS/CAMDS timely.
- Goal Achievement: Support manager to achieve goals set and complete any tasks assigned on time.
- Initiative: Take initiative to make improvements and help peers work more effectively and efficiently.
- User Experience Enhancement: Focused on taking user interaction and experience to the next level.
- User Testing: Performing user tests and collecting qualitative and quantitative feedback.
- UI Development: Developing UI concepts and designs for the app/web.
- Research Integration: Embrace both quantitative and qualitative research to define a best-in-class experience.
- Team Leadership: Lead the design team of 3+ colleagues and build a strategy for the team.
- Web and App Design: Create the web and app design with the team.
- Digital Marketing Support: Provide digital support for marketing campaigns.
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Work cross-functionally with other teams.
5. Design Leader Accountabilities
- Customer Experience Design: Provide extraordinary experiences for consumer products based on customer research, data analytics, and industry trends.
- Cybersecurity Product Design: Design products that protect hundreds of millions of users daily from cyber security threats.
- Innovation Leadership: Act as a change agent, leading the future of innovation on McAfee's newest and cutting-edge consumer product.
- Mobile-First Design Strategy: Promote a mobile-first design strategy to achieve responsive, and seamless experiences across all digital devices.
- Workshop Facilitation: Facilitate design workshops with product management, engineering, marketing, and other teams to explore multiple concepts with clear user goals and testable hypotheses.
- Interaction Design & Prototyping: Create user flows, journey maps, interaction patterns, information architecture, wireframes, storyboards, design specs, and prototypes to effectively communicate interaction and design ideas.
- Agile Collaboration: Participate in design sprints, daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and lean product testing.
- UX Metrics & Reporting: Measure and present actual UX outcomes using qualitative and quantitative methods.