Jobs

EightShapes, LLC, a user experience consultancy based in Washington, DC.

Open Positions

Interaction Designer

Knows a bunch about designing interfaces for complex web-based services, and can play in the areas of information architecture, interaction design, prototyping, and conceptual modeling.

Visual Designer

Plays nicely with interaction designers, and effortlessly moves between developing completely fresh visual concepts, applying a strict set of visual standards, and producing detailed design specifications.

Our Requirements

We want to hire you. What’s the catch? We have eight (count ‘em) requirements:

1. You have to know quite a bit about user-centered design, and have an opinion (and back it up) about the role of prototyping in the design process.
2. You produce professional design documentation, know how to adjust your documentation style depending on circumstance, and can demonstrate that in your portfolio.
3. You can prioritize actionability and practicality, and know what we mean when we say that.
4. You demonstrate excellent communication skills, and stand up to Dan when he plays “bad cop”.
5. You can work independently, plan your activities (and communicate that plan), meet your deadlines, and ask for help when you need it (or even when you don’t need it, so expect to collaborate).
6. You can tell a good story.
7. You are beyond “beginner” with both Sharpies and the Adobe Creative Suite, or have intermediate-to-advanced skills with a comparable package (is there one?) such that a transition to how we create and describe things is a breeze.
8. You know a little something about what’s under the hood, and understand the capabilities and limits of presentation layer technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and others.

EightShapes is based in Washington, DC, but we have a distributed workforce. We use collaboration technologies both new (screen sharing) and old (conference calls). You should be comfortable spending some time working remotely from the rest of your project team.

Your Application

That’s the easy part. Your cost of entry:

• Three or more years’ experience — we are only hiring experienced designers
• Portfolio that demonstrates the range and quality of your work, whether you’re a designer, writer, coder or project manager
• Three positive references (from a peer, a manager, and a customer)

Note that showing up to the interview with a copy of Nathan’s book does not automatically get you the job, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. What would hurt is if you have the book but don’t know what it’s about. Tell us a story about what we wrote, now that’s a winner!

Next Steps: Email Us!

Sound intriguing? Drop us a line.