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Starting immediately, Flickr is looking to hire a Senior User Experience Designer for our San Francisco, CA office.

Flickr revolutionized photo sharing with its launch in 2004. Its innovative approach to how people store, share, sort and search for photos has attracted millions of users and influenced the way the current generation of web-based products and services are developed. Flickr’s vision is to be the ‘eyes of the world‘, enabling the sharing and discovery of what people see around the globe, from friends and family to group collaboration to breaking news. Flickr was acquired by Yahoo! in March 2005, and remains a separate brand.

The Flickr team is star-studded but prides itself on teamwork, technically capable but operates in a product- and user-driven paradigm and is profoundly driven to take Flickr as far beyond where we are now as the web in 2008 is beyond the web in 1995. We have a privileged position inside of Yahoo! and a mandate to change the world (and the company). This will be a job that you love and are proud of for your entire life.

Every week, millions of users visit Flickr.com and millions more access Flickr through API-based applications, photos posted to blogs and other third party sites and services. It’s a complex and quickly growing application and ecosystem and design is at the heart of it.

We have a track record of innovation to build on and a strong desire to radically improve Flickr, both for new users and casual visitors as well as the power users who form the core of the community. There’s a huge and tremendously long list of new features, programs and technologies set to come online this year. If you’ve ever wanted to have a big impact, this is it.

Some key attributes of successful candidates will be:

• Ability to quickly understand the constraints of a design problem and identify the tradeoffs; the ability to communicate those tradeoffs to fellow decision makers
• Strong empathic skills: you should be able to understand how and why an interface succeeds or fails and spot problems in layout, architecture, flow, copy or presentation before they go into production
• Solid interaction design skills: experience creating wireframes, site/system flows, site architecture diagrams, etc.
• Strong visual design skills (layout, hierarchy, typography, color theory, patterns) and a fanatical attention to detail down to the pixel
• Understanding of and familiarity with system and page-level interactions
• Solid understanding of user-centered design principles with the ability to address complex design problems and provide sound design solutions
• Demonstrated experience and proven track record in application/software design
• A good all-rounder, informed by deep thought and consideration into the philosophical and practical considerations that make great design
• Ability to include stakeholders in project discussions and successfully incorporate/address their feedback
• BFA or MFA in Graphic Design, Digital Media Design, HCI or Visual Arts
• At least 5+ year’s experience as key member of a design team participating in the complete product development lifecycle of a web product.
• At least 2+ years experience leading large design efforts and coordinating project teams of 3 or more members

Some key responsibilities of the position:

• Work with the design, business and community teams to create designs that address business, brand, market, and user requirements
• Participate and collaborate in concept development and design ideation
• Create page layouts/UIs, color palettes, typography, wireframes, system flows, prototypes, iconography and user interface elements, while monitoring design consistency across all projects
• Work directly with Web Development and (Software) Engineering on design solutions that align with the design vision and user needs
• Work with the larger development team to address on-going design bugs
• Communicate your design thinking in a way that works for all the parties involved (engineers, product managers, partners,etc.) through appropriately detailed specifications and reviews
• Contribution to product design process and priority decisions
• Ensuring Flickr is both usable and powerful, simple when it needs to be, and delights its users with attention to detail and a prescient forethought to their needs
• Push the boundaries of what’s possible on the web to create better experiences for users

Bonus:

• Academic background in human factors/ergonomics, cognitive science, psychology or HCI
• Design experience in mobile or desktop software
• Experience creating or maintaining interface guidelines in a software ecosystem environment

To apply:

We smile on those who already have deep experience with Flickr: include a link to your photos page if you have one. Be prepared to tell us why you want to work on Flickr specifically.

Please send an email to iwannaworkatflickr@yahoo.com with the job’s title (Senior User Experience Designer) as the subject line. Include a cover letter and resume: bonus points if the resume can be included in the email or if it is online somewhere and you just send a link (we will accept attachments but we’ll be really annoyed by them — please keep that in mind).

Note that we are comfortable shaping the roles to fit excellent candidates, so if you are not an exact match for the role described put "[Similar to:]" (with the square brackets) before the job title in the subject line and apply anyway.