Product Designer in Abingdon

Informa is a leading academic publishing, business intelligence, knowledge, and events business, creating unique content and connectivity for customers all over the world.

It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a member of the FTSE 100.

Taylor & Francis is one of the world’s largest publishers of high-quality, peer reviewed scholarly journals, books, e-books and reference works.

We empower learners, thinkers and doers with trusted knowledge that advances research and enriches lives.

We bring together diverse people, ideas and opinions to validate and publish the experts, theories and truths that matter.

And we’ve been doing this in an unbroken arc since 1798.

Our purpose is to foster human progress through knowledge.

We strongly believe that this requires us to encourage and examine different ideas and voices, so that any work that meets our exacting levels of quality deserves to be included in our publications.

This requires open minds, the opportunity for robust debate, and the courage to defend perspectives that stand up to scrutiny, even if they conflict with our personal beliefs or values.

Because that’s the only way to find the best obtainable version of the truth and, ultimately, foster human progress.

If you agree, then we’d love to hear from you.

Product design at Taylor and Francis is a creative and strategic discipline that shapes our platforms and user experiences.

As a Product Designer reporting to the Head of Product Design, you'll own end-to-end design from problem discovery to production-ready solutions serving millions of users, working as a genuine partner to Product Managers and customers.

This role goes beyond traditional UX design, you'll bring product thinking to design and design thinking to product, understanding both why and how something should be built.

You'll actively use research, data, and direct customer contact throughout your design process, while holding the design bar for your domain with confidence and craft.

Discovery & Problem

Shaping: You are a participant in discovery not a recipient of its outputs.

You will help define what problem is worth solving and shape how the team investigates it.

• Engage directly with customers and users conducting your own qualitative research, synthesising behavioural signals, and bringing a designer's eye to what people need versus what they say they want.
• Partner with the UX Researcher to design research studies and translate findings into design implications not just observations.
• Contribute to problem framing and opportunity definition alongside the Product Managers, using design tools journey maps, service blueprints, experience principles to make abstract problems concrete and actionable.
• Identify the moments in the user journey that matter most and advocate for the design investment that those moments deserve.
• Bring a point of view to prioritisation conversations, not just on what would be best to design, but on what the user cost of not designing it well would be.

Design Craft & Execution: You hold the standard for design quality. From early exploration to final delivery, everything that ships should reflect considered, intentional design.

• Lead the design process end-to-end from rough conceptual sketches through wireframes, interaction design, and high-fidelity production-ready output.
• Generate multiple design directions for significant problems before converging resisting the pull toward the first adequate solution and exploring the space with genuine creative curiosity.
• Design interactions that are not just usable but genuinely well-considered attending to the detail of motion, feedback, state, error handling, and edge cases that separate good design from great design.
• Build and test prototypes at the fidelity the question demands low fidelity to test concepts quickly, high-fidelity to validate the details before build.
• Work with the product team to understand the full range of scenarios, edge cases, and business rules that your designs need to accommodate ensuring nothing is left to interpretation in engineering.

Research-Informed Design: Strong design at T&F is built on genuine user understanding. You will be an active generator of insight, not just a consumer of it.

• Run lightweight, focused research as a natural part of your design process concept testing, usability sessions, preference studies without waiting for a formal research sprint.
• Synthesise research findings, NPS data, behavioural analytics, and customer intelligence into design decisions that are clearly evidenced and easy for others to understand.
• Know when your assumptions need testing and build the test, do not let designs go to engineering without having validated the core user-facing assumptions.
• Maintain a working knowledge of how users behave across your domain through regular exposure to data, session recordings, and direct customer contact.

Cross-Functional Partnership: The best experiences at T&F come from tight collaboration across design, product, engineering, and data. You invest in those relationships.

• Work with engineering from early in the design process involving them in problem exploration, getting technical input before designs are finalised, and ensuring implementation intent is understood.
• Partner with the PM to shape what gets built not just how it looks. Your voice should be present in roadmap conversations, trade-off discussions, and success metric definitions.
• Collaborate with the Data & Intelligence team to understand how personalisation, recommendations, and data-driven features can be expressed through design in ways that feel useful rather than intrusive.
• Work with the BA to ensure design intent is fully captured in requirements that acceptance criteria reflect the experience, not just the function

Qualifications

• Significant experience in product design or UX design, with a portfolio that demonstrates end-to end ownership of complex, consumer-facing digital product experiences.
• A portfolio that shows thinking as clearly as it shows craft, we want to understand how you approached problems, not just what the final screens looked like.
• Genuine product instinct, you have opinions about what should be built and why, and you can articulate them clearly in a room with PMs, engineers, and senior stakeholders.
• Deep user empathy built through direct, regular contact with real users not mediated entirely through research reports or analytics.
• Strong interaction design skills you think carefully about states, transitions, feedback, error handling, and the full range of scenarios, not just the happy path.
• Proficiency in Figma and experience contributing to or maintaining a design system at scale.
• Collaborative working style you bring design into cross-functional conversations rather than working in isolation and presenting finished work.
• Comfort with data you can read a funnel report, interpret session data, and understand what behavioural signals mean for the experiences you are designing.
• Clear, confident communication you can present and defend design decisions to senior stakeholders and respond to challenge without becoming defensive or immediately capitulating.
• What you should know

This role is based in the UK and you must have the right to work and live in the UK.

We believe that great things happen when people connect face-to-face.

That's why we work in-person with each other, or with customers and partners, three days a week or more.

When you’re not spending time together in one of our offices or other workplaces – like at conference – you get the flexibility and support to work from home or remotely.

The successful candidate will be able to utilise our balanced working model.

We ask that candidates live within a commutable distance to our Milton Park office or Bengaluru Office to ensure that as a balanced worker they can make it to our office location 3 days per week.

Please note that our Milton Park office will be relocating to Oxford city centre in late 2027 / early 2028, offering an exciting new workplace in the heart of the city.

What we offer in return

• A competitive salary + bonus
• An excellent work/life balance with a fantastic, flexible working culture
• 25 days annual leave
• 3 additional discretionary days off during the holiday season at the end of the year
• 4 volunteering days annually
• Day off for your birthday
• Company funded single cover private medical insurance
• Employee assistance programme – offering 24/7 well-being support
• Share Match – Plan that matches every share purchased with two free shares.
• Pension scheme
• Life assurance, plus optical and medical care
• Being Yourself at Taylor & Francis

If you’re excited about working with Taylor & Francis to foster human progress through knowledge, we invite you to apply even if your existing skills and experience don’t fit every item listed above.

At Taylor & Francis, we are at our best and most successful when colleagues can be themselves and contribute regardless of their identity or background.

As a colleague, you will have the opportunity to further innovate and develop in areas that you are passionate about.

Our goal is to empower you with the resources, incentives, and flexibility you need to enjoy success at work and to live a healthy, balanced life.

Taylor & Francis is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.

We believe in and value diversity of people and thought, fostering a supportive and inclusive environment where all colleagues can learn and succeed as their true selves.

Taylor & Francis recruits, develops, and retains colleagues without regard to any protected personal characteristics or other non-merit‑based factor.

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