UX Lead (commerce) in London

Who We Are VML, part of WPP, is a leading creative company that combines brand experience, customer experience, and commerce, creating connected brands to drive growth. VML is celebrated for its innovative and human first, award-winning work for blue chip client partners including AstraZeneca, Colgate-Palmolive, Dell, Ford, Microsoft, Nestlé, The Coca-Cola Company, and Wendy's.

The opportunity: We’re looking for an experienced Lead UXer, that is ready to take the next step in helping us to shape and scale our UX offering, working alongside Leads in UI design, Optimisation and Consulting. Reporting into the Head of CX, this is a role requiring someone of excellent eCommerce technical ability, who is just as comfortable supervising the delivery of wireframes and research projects, to running client workshops, and defining a compelling Experience Design & Optimisation strategy.

As UX lead, you’ll be an expert in eCommerce, responsible for the experience design strategy and innovations, directing large-scale UX projects, managing and coaching a team of UXers, ensuring quality, defining WoW, and involved in new business pitches and growing our pipeline. You’ll relish solving problems, creating break-through work and automating for efficiencies and scale.

What you’ll be doing:

• Define a compelling UX strategy, help shape our UX offering.
• Lead the UX design teams and ensure functional excellence, collaboration and alignment.
• Strengthen all phases of the design process, including research, wireframes, prototypes, usability testing and CRO.
• Build a strong experience design culture and help create experience models and packages that change the customer experience and benefit our client’s bottom line.
• Lead improvements in the user experience, research and optimisation.
• Advocate user experience best practices and ensure quality processes in-team.
• Develop conversion led UX and a customer-focussed design culture across the business.
• Attract and retain top UX design talent and be actively involved in hiring for roles and scaling team.
• Serve as a coach and mentor to the UX design team, ensuring quality, team sharing and career development.
• Work with the Analytics team to build our CRO offering and synthesise customer insights from multiple sources.
• Design and conduct product definition and UX requirements workshops.
• Present and playback experience maps, wireframes, user flows and designs – both to working groups and C-Suite.
• Direct the production of journey maps, personas, scenarios, process flows, information architecture diagrams and other artefacts required to develop and evolve product definition and user experience design.
• Oversee the delivery of low and/or high-fidelity wireframes and communicate its rationale to clients and internal teams.
• Collaborate with Account Leads, Head of CX, Analytics, Optimisation, Consultancy, program managers, developers and clients.

What we want from you:

• Extensive experience as a senior UX Designer in eCommerce, ideally in an agency.
• Experience in developing and conducting a variety of both qualitative and quantitative research.
• Experience designing and leading workshops.
• Ability to communicate effectively at all levels, collaborate to solve problems, present design and sell solutions, and keep colleagues informed.
• Understand the array of technical constraints, user goals and business requirements that shape current and future developments.
• Can collaborate with stakeholders, product managers and development teams to iterate existing products and design and build new functionality.
• Ability to supervise and support the creation of user flows, wireframes, information architecture, interface mock-ups and final UI designs which synthesize user data and research.
• Extensive UX design background working on various projects across sectors/audiences.
• Previous experience of leading, mentoring, managing a team or experience owning a project from start to finish.
• Experience and track record of large-scale re-design transformation projects.
• Experience owning the full UX process. Strong portfolio is a must.
• Automotive experience is ideal but not essential.

What we can offer you:

• Alongside the opportunity to work with some of the most exciting brands around the world, we’ll also prioritise your career development and help you grow your skills.
• We’ll empower you to make a difference, allow you to be yourself, and respect who you are.
• Permanent only: We offer a great benefits package including a discretionary bonus scheme, training opportunities, competitive pension, medical insurance, life assurance, social events, opportunities to buy and sell holidays, family friendly policies, discounts with hundreds of retailers and much more.

Our culture thrives on our core values, designed for impact-driven individuals: Heart, Brains and Courage. We lead with Heart, fostering empathy and trust where genuine connections and human-centric work flourish. We empower your Brains for innovation, valuing relentless curiosity and collaborative intelligence to solve complex challenges. And we champion Courage, inspiring you to speak up, embrace experimentation, and advocate for bold solutions that push our thinking to be better than yesterday.