Category
About the Applicant
The Product Design team at NASDAQ OMX leads the design strategy, vision, and delivery of web and mobile products that serve communications, public relations, and investor relations professionals. We've established a design culture where we work collaboratively with product management and our clients from project inception to delivery and after launch.
We've grown from one full time & 1 part time designer in early 2012 to 28 product designers and a project manager. We're spread across 8 states and the United Kingdom, but primarily based in New York City.
In 2013, NASDAQ OMX product designers spoke at 9 international design conferences, and we've been invited to speak at the IA Summit, Webvisions, Giant Conference, UX Week, and many more in 2014.
NASDAQ OMX
Product Design
- How designers can code in the enterprise: We provide our development colleagues semantically correct and valid HTML & CSS and do so in an environment that engineers can readily use our code. We’ve been able to train and support our designers to be comfortable in designing in code but in a process that enables paired programming, reuse, and reduced rework.
- How designers who code can still be responsible for strategy, research, and usability testing: We don’t over-specialize so our designers are consistently growing and being challenged to leave their comfort zone. Designers who are more comfortable in code are expected to participate in discovery interviews and IA exercises; designers more comfortable in identifying workflow challenges may still lead a coding-heavy workshop.
- Recruiting women and under-represented people to our team: We’ve had tremendous success identifying and sourcing great designers who aren’t typical straight white male ‘bro-grammers’. By stretching outside of our immediate networks, not blindly following job descriptions, and reaching out directly to people instead of simply posting a job description and letting people come to us, we’ve been able to create a diverse environment of many backgrounds and life experiences. In addition, this approach has saved NASDAQ OMX over $150k year over year by not paying 3rd party recruiters to find and place our team members.
- Balancing remote and colocated designers: My team seats 14 people in NYC and we have another 15 people who work remotely from London, up and down the east coast, and 5 in Southern California
- How to successfully work with remote and same-location colleagues involving key stakeholders, management, etc. in the design process: It’s not just our fellow designers who are are remote; a majority of our stakeholders are remote as well. Yet we continue to involve them in numerous design-led activities such as prioritization exercises, affinity diagramming, participating in usability tests and discovery interviews, and design studio sketching workshops.
