Overview

Position may be remote, see specific states or based in Wirecutter’s NYC or LA offices)

Wirecutter, the product review and buying guide arm of The New York Times Company, is seeking an experienced Product Designer. This team is responsible for designing and building experiences and features in the CMS and the front-end of our reader-facing website. In this role, you will be tasked with researching and designing key features for our reviews, deals, the homepage, as well as new opportunities we’ve yet to explore.

You will be the sole designer on this team, which means an immense responsibility and opportunity to shape the future of the website. You’ll work together with a tightly knit team of product thinkers, editors, and engineers to shepherd and improve the core of what millions of Wirecutter readers know and love us for.

On a day-to-day basis, you’ll mostly work with a cross-functional relationship team, which includes: a product manager, project manager, and an engineering manager plus a team of engineers.

When you apply, please include a portfolio of your work, highlighting projects that focus on:

  • Balancing user needs with business goals
  • UX solutions to complex problems
  • Strong visual design that tells a story or expresses a brand

Responsibilities:

Evolve and improve the core experiences on Wirecutter.com, including reviews, deals, and the homepage:

  • Collaborate closely with editorial partners to create the best expression of our journalistic values for readers
  • Embody product design thinking by bridging Wirecutter’s readers’ needs with our business goals
  • Work with the team to pose hypotheses and help design tests (qualitative and A/B) to help us validate relationship ideas before investing in them
  • Conduct research such as competitive analysis, reader interviews, and usability tests
  • Contribute to requirements and translate them into a design approach, working in collaboration with product and engineering
  • Interview internal stakeholders to inform requirements for new product offerings
  • Present findings to leadership and achieve alignment

Bring more narrative and personality to the website, translating the spirit of Wirecutter to useful and delightful experiences for readers:

  • Articulate what is unique about Wirecutter, and marry that to user experiences that speak to readers
  • Use research to inform your design, backing up decisions and making difficult tradeoffs when needed
  • Work closely with other product designers and the creative team to express our narrative and personality through design, interactions, thoughtful touches to our UI.
  • Deliver engineering-ready, visually and typographically coherent design that is consistent with Wirecutter’s look and feel
  • Work with engineers on the team to perform VQA for your own design work and be accountable for the visual quality of the team’s work overall

Contribute to the overall design and design culture at Wirecutter:

  • Communicate openly in crit sessions and throughout work, both by sharing work in progress and by giving thoughtful feedback
  • Research new patterns and technologies and experiment with new tools to keep improving Wirecutter’s design culture
  • Extend Wirecutter’s design system as needed to help us maintain consistency as our portfolio of products grows

Qualifications:

  • Minimum of 3 years of design experience, preferably working on a digital product.
  • Editorial design background a plus, work experience as a designer where you engaged with content
  • Strong visual and typographic sensibility
  • Deep understanding for how qualitative research and data inform product and design decisions, previous experience designing qualitative and A/B design testing
  • Ability to speak product fluently: breaking down big challenges into smaller decisions, and framing problems as tradeoff decisions (e.g. time vs. scope).
  • Enthusiasm for Wirecutter’s mission.
  • Strong interpersonal skills. Collaboration and communication are the heart of the Wirecutter.com team. On any given feature, product, design, and engineering come together at the very start, and it will be up to you to actively reach out and nurture these ties with your partners.
  • Understanding of HTML and CSS techniques
  • Able to provide samples of work that show complex and creative UX solutions, as well as extraordinary visual design
  • A great listener who loves giving and receiving honest, thoughtful feedback
  • Steadfast in defense of both the user experience and the editorial brand while also contributing to solutions that drive the business forward
  • Enjoy working on a cross-discipline team alongside editors, engineers, product managers, and other designers
  • Enjoy shipping small, quick experiments to explore or validate your ideas

When you apply, please include a portfolio of your work, highlighting projects that focus on:

  • Balancing user needs with business goals
  • UX solutions to complex problems
  • Strong visual design that tells a story or expresses a brand

Wirecutter is a list of the best products for people who don’t want to take a lot of time figuring out what to get. It was founded in September 2011, and it became a part of The New York Times Company in October 2016.

The company’s purpose: to help people find great things, quickly and easily. Through rigorous testing, research, reporting, and whatever means necessary, they create straightforward recommendations that save readers from unnecessary stress, time, and effort. We then monetize these reviews through enabling our readers to easily purchase the products they are interested in.

The New York Times Company is making a sizable investment to accelerate growth of the business. Wirecutter aims to expand this business by improving performance of existing product categories while applying Wirecutter product review approach to new product categories, in addition to exploring new revenue opportunities in commerce.

Even with offices in New York City and Los Angeles, Wirecutter remains a highly remote culture, and open to employing people across the country.  Right now, we are eligible to hire residents in these states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Washington.

The New York Times is committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce, one that reflects the varied global community we serve. Our journalism and the products we build in the service of that journalism greatly benefit from a range of perspectives, which can only come from diversity of all types, across our ranks, at all levels of the organization. Achieving true diversity and inclusion is the right thing to do. It is also the smart thing for our business. So we strongly encourage women, veterans, people with disabilities, people of color and gender nonconforming candidates to apply.

The New York Times Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of an individual’s sex, age, race, color, creed, national origin, alienage, religion, marital status, pregnancy, sexual orientation or affectional preference, gender identity and expression, disability, genetic trait or predisposition, carrier status, citizenship, veteran or military status and other personal characteristics protected by law. All applications will receive consideration for employment without regard to legally protected characteristics.