Experience Designer - Recommendations – 12m FTC in Manchester

At Sainsbury’s we believe that the customer should be at the heart of everything we do. Our vision is to create the easiest, most enjoyable experiences that better serve our customers’ ever-changing needs. We work across a range of services, products, touch points and tools to deliver distinctive, integrated, and consistent experiences for our customers and colleagues across Sainsbury’s Group (which includes Sainsbury’s Food, Argos, Bank, Nectar, Tu and Habitat). We drive brilliant experiences across all our brands in-store and online, operating in agile teams and squads, working seamlessly with teams right across the business to make the most of the exceptional knowledge, insight and talent we have.

The role: You'll be working on Sainsbury’s products within our General Merchandising team, which are mostly focused on our end to end digital experiences for Argos, Habitat and Tu. We take 1.2 billion transactions from our customers each year, which gives you an idea of the scale and complexity of the space you’ll be working in. You’ll get to work on our new product and experience launches, work closely with our in-store teams and collaborate with wider design disciplines to ensure a truly excellent end to end experience for our customers. In your product team, you’ll lead design, work with researchers to lead discovery and testing of new ideas and help define the roadmap; your aim will be to understand our customers and the problems they face. The changes you make will impact millions of customers in one of the UK's largest retailers.

What you'll do:

• Research customer needs through observation and interviews
• Organise and conduct in-store and remote research
• Interact with stakeholders from across the group to share insights and ideas
• Design and test concepts and solutions
• Collaborate with diverse teams from different disciplines
• Champion inclusive design principles in your work and throughout the team
• Work within agile teams to get your solutions into the hands of our customers

What we're looking for:

• Industry experience as a UX or Product Designer is essential.
• Strong visual, interface and interaction design skills
• Expertise designing and prototyping with tools such as Figma
• Effective use of AI tools to accelerate research, ideation and design delivery
• Capable of conducting research and interpreting results
• Knowledge of how to design inclusively
• Influence and negotiation skills
• Adaptable to changing priorities, complexity and unknowns
• Confidence challenging your peers and stakeholders
• Taking the initiative and driving change
• Tailoring your approach for different audiences

Essential criteria:

• Extensive industry experience as a UX or Product Designer.
• Ability to collaborate with a broad range of stakeholders to ensure all business requirements are met.
• Skilled in planning and conducting user research and distilling findings into actionable insights.
• Proficient in applying UX fundamentals, including insight gathering, workshop facilitation, information architecture, interface and interaction design and clearly documented design artifacts.

Support we will provide:

• A thriving design culture, opportunity to discuss and share work with open, collaborative feedback
• A mature design system and set of standards to work with
• Research, accessibility and UX copywriting expertise

Responsibilities: We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. Think about the scale it takes to feed the nation. The level of data, transactions and variety involved. Then you’ll realise this is a modern software engineering environment, because it has to be. We’ve made significant investment in the standards and principles that shape how we work. We iterate, learn, experiment and champion ways of working such as Agile, Scrum and XP. So you can look forward to exciting opportunities across everything from AI to reusable tech.

Qualifications: We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer, so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new - whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits.

Here are some of them:

• Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to get 10% off at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat after 4 weeks. This increases to 15% off at Sainsbury’s every Friday and Saturday and 15% off at Argos every pay day.
• We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover.
• You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 10% of salary, depending on how we perform.
• Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy additional holiday.
• We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, pay advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers.
• And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme.
• Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.

Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).