Lead UX - Higher Education

We are searching for a UX Lead Designer to help us create accessible, engaging products and services that are meaningful to teachers and learners in the Higher Education segment in the Dutch market. Our company, a market leader in the Netherlands with over 20% market share, offers two key platforms. The first is an online learning platform that supports blended learning, providing students and teachers with flexible access to academic materials. The second platform focuses on improving grammar and writing proficiency in Dutch and English, serving both educational and business markets to enhance language skills and productivity.

You will lead this segment together with the product and engineering lead and you will lead the UX designer that is part of this segment. As part of the UX team, you will design and validate user experiences for our digital solutions based on quantitative and qualitative data.

You breathe and talk UX. You’re no stranger to applying your skills on a strategic or service level or call upon them for facilitation and communicating design to stakeholders and direct UX colleagues alike. Next to that, you have vast experience in people management.

👩‍🏫 Who are we?

For everyone who discovers. For everyone who grows. For everyone who performs and challenges themselves. For your smallest dreams and your biggest ambitions. Learning will take you further. From your first day at school to the next step in your career. Infinitas Learning is there for you and everyone who learns.

Infinitas Learning is a leading supplier of innovative and appealing educative products and services for education and learning. Infinitas Learning consists of four educative publishers in Europe: Noordhoff in the Netherlands, Liber in Sweden, Plantyn in Belgium, LeYa in Portugal and WSiP in Poland.

At Infinitas Learning people have a passion to transform the way people learn. The goals is to offer flexible, leading solutions that support these new approaches of learning in the 21st century.

The Infinitas companies create an impressive range of educative resources that are used in private households, schools within primary, secondary or higher education or within professional institutions. The products include interactive software, online learning, e-books, audiobooks and printed textbooks, of which many are market leaders in their segment.

🏅 What are our values?

• Mission Driven: We reflect the values of the teachers and learners who use our products

• Open and Empowered: Creativity blossoms only when freed from fear

• Servant leaders: Leadership is approachable and supportive

• Diverse and Inclusive: We take strength from our diversity

• Reliable and Accountable: We do what we said we would, and take the responsibility we have in owning the products across ILPT seriously

🎯 The Objective of the Role

The UX Lead Designer is part of the three-headed dragon together with the Product and Engineering Lead, and is ultimately responsible for the quality of the gathered insights through UX research and the design output delivered by the design team.

The UX Lead Designer of a segment is a designated role, to oversee, direct and take responsibility for the successful delivery of all design and UX-research-related work and initiatives of their design team, to improve the end-to-end user experience of the product(s) within their segment.

A Lead UX designer is capable of leading the design for an entire area or suite of products in a segment, and leading other (senior) UX designers in their area.

The UX lead designer is a leading performer who can balance a hands-on approach with project management while fostering a collaborative and empowering team environment.

Typical work and initiatives are:

• Vision/strategy projects: visualizing the to be customer experience.

• Aligning with UX programs: UX-research, Product identity, Design-system and the UX-lab.

• Research projects: establishing needs and UX-research activities.

• Design projects: interaction design, user-experience design and UI-design.

Tasks and responsibilities

1. Vision & Strategy

• Work closely with internal and external stakeholders in establishing the product vision and objectives for the segment.

• Ability to visualize the to-be customer experience in a compelling way.

• Ability to take stakeholders along in sharing vision and strategy.

• Formulate and align the objectives of the design team.

• Create and align a plan to meet set objectives and/or vision.

• Shape, document and align the UX-design process.

2. UX-research & insights

• Is the voice of the end-user and is responsible for the quality of gathered insights.

• Establish UX-research needs of the segment and create and communicate a plan to go forward to understand and improve the end-to-end user-experience.

• Direct and align UX-research initiatives to improve the product (s) of the segment.

• Collaborate with non-segment stakeholders to align UX-research needs and initiatives.

• Collaborate with the design program of ILUX UX-research to expand the ILUX UX-research playbook.

• Directs and coaches designers in formulating and executing their research, to enhance quality and the skill sets of the team members.

• Responsible for the formulation of user-requirements and specifications coming from insights, for the design-team to work with. Such as personas, storyboards, scenarios, flowcharts or design specifications.

3. UX-design & quality of work

• Expert in (UX) design and responsible for the quality of output to improve the end-to-end user-experience.

• Work closely with the Product and Engineering Lead to decide what needs to be done and where to involve UX-research and/or UX-design.

• Oversees the (quality) of briefings to assigned designers and collaborate with product-management to improve the quality.

• Is the first point of contact of all non-roadmap related requests for UX-research or design, to align initiatives and increase quality of work in the segment.

• Directs and coaches designers in their UX-process, decision making and output ******to enhance quality and the skill sets of the team members.

• Collaborate with UX design programs to align and adopt UX design requirements.

• Direct and coach the design team on implementing UX design requirements.

4. People Management

• Directs and coaches designers in their UX-process, decision making and output to enhance quality and the skill sets of the team members.

• Understands what is needed from whom to reach the common goals of the Segment Vision and able to prioritise and drive towards that vision on a daily and longer term basis based on the available design resources in the team.

• Knows how to balance clear direction and autonomy for the team.

5. Reporting lines

• The UX Lead Designer reports directly to the UX Director for resources, design-programs and requirements, and professional and personal growth.

• UX-designers in the segment report functionally to their UX Lead Designer of that segment.

• The UX Lead Designer works closely with the Product Lead and Engineering Lead to manage and direct their teams within the segment and also meets regularly with the 3-headed-dragon of UX Director, Product and Engineering Director.

• The UX Lead Designer is a stakeholder in de design-programs and collaborates with other stakeholders and design leads to bring the programs forward.

• The UX Lead Designer is part of the Digital Design Lead roundtable.

👀 What are we looking for?

• You bring significant experience in designing and developing solutions where you translate needs and complexity into a user-friendly interface that entices our users. You do this through your design thinking approach and that extra bit of magic sauce only you can bring to the table. For this you collaborate with your design, product & data colleagues.

• You work together with stakeholders to create the necessary vision, high-level roadmap to ensure long term strategic objectives are achieved.

• You determine, together with the development team and product manager of your segment, the scope of the functionalities you will improve or implement. You will do this based on spending time with end-users on a regular basis to truly understand their needs.

• You are curious and enjoy sharing acquired knowledge and insights with others. You enjoy collaborating with your colleagues and, by being aware of their needs, you find appropriate solutions to help them along and strengthen the design community.

• You’re comfortable in reporting on progress to senior management, and act as a strategic sparring partner for management.

What makes you a good fit:

While we don't like creating a detailed set of criteria that then filters out some potentially great candidates, it is important you have an idea of the type of thing we will be looking for after you apply - so please take these as a guide, but if you are uncertain please don't let it stop you applying!

• 10+ years of experience as a UX Designer, with a proven track record of designing successful digital products, and 5+ years in managing people. A healthy dose of experience, and knowledge trump just about any degree you can throw at us here but A Bachelor's or Master’s degree related to Interaction Design/Human Computer Interaction (HCI) or a portfolio that demonstrates equivalent experience is a plus.

• We consider proficiency in user-centered design principles, practices, and methodologies as a given but we put extra value on specific skills you bring in relation to education. Demonstrating how you think, the problems you solved and how you solved them is what we’re interested in.

• Your solutions and design patterns may be used in other platforms within the same organization, so it's crucial to understand the context of your solution with regard to the other platforms. This means you can think of it in an abstract manner and, when it makes sense, build it with a certain modularity using our design system. You advocate and share these patterns to the design community and contribute them to our design system.

• You are a visionary that likes to drive design forward in your team, Infinitas Design and Infinitas Technology, with ideas and provoking concepts that will push our platforms forward as well.

• You always prioritise the user and can properly support your design decisions towards the development team and business stakeholders. At the same time, you should be able to find the sweet spot between the user, business, and technological feasibility with the help of your product and tech peers.

• Easily work with the development team and ensure that your designs are clearly documented and communicated.

• You are a force in building out the design community together with your colleagues.

• You are well versed in leading design thinking workshops and design sprints.

• You are proficient in Figma and you will be working with and contributing to Pixel, our design system.

• You understand the importance of inclusive and accessible design and know how to articulate that.

• You are able to communicate fluently in English for team communication and in Dutch for user testing in Dutch markets.

⚙️ How we work

Our teams are a mix of local and remote people, as we try to bring on board the best Product, UX and Engineering people we can, regardless of where they are located. You have experience working in this type of environment and are comfortable using tools (such as or similar to ProductBoard, Slack, Figma, Azure DevOps and the like) to facilitate teams to get the best out of their time.

We are a dynamic group of digital designers and researchers, with our own specialties. We want you to join us and grow to the next level. Together, we will explore and discover what is needed to realize this mission, for design, and for you.

Our Digital Design team is distributed across Europe and is on a mission to shape the future of learning. You can work remotely or at one of our local design teams (Belgium, the Netherlands or Sweden) , and hours can be used flexibly in consultation. In this role, you would report into the UX Design Lead for the segment you work for.

🏆 What do you get from us?

• A job with a real purpose where you can contribute to society.

• Opportunity to work with a diverse team across a range of European countries.

• Attractive and flexible working conditions.

• Flexible working hours depending on team requirements as to when, where, and how you work.

• You can also count on attractive and flexible terms of employment, including a Personal Choice Budget (PKB) and a profit-sharing distribution.

Interested? Please apply!

Do you recognize yourself in our profile? Please send us a message! We are looking forward to chatting with you.

⏳ What happens after you apply?

• Iris, our Design Director, and Giorgio, our a.i. Lead UX for HE, will do the first review of your application and agree to proceed. We aim to have a response within five working days regarding the following steps. If we decide not to proceed, we will also let you know and explain why.

• Your interview will be done by Giorgio, together with someone else from either the Design Team or Product Team, to get a better understanding of your experience, your way of working and you as a person. We will carve out time in the interview so you can show a case of your previous work so we will get a better sense of your approach and experience.

• If happy with this first conversation, a second interview will be done by Katriina our Product Lead. We will at that stage also ask you to prepare an assignment to showcase back to us.