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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Usability Director

💰 $130,000 - $220,000

UXUsabilityUser ResearchDesign Leadership

🎯 Role Definition

This role requires an experienced Usability Director to lead our user experience strategy, deliver exceptional usability across digital products, and build a high-performing UX organization. The Usability Director drives user research programs, usability testing, accessibility compliance (WCAG), and cross-functional design partnerships to improve conversion, engagement, and customer satisfaction. This senior leader defines the UX roadmap, mentors senior UX talent, sets usability standards, and partners with product, engineering, analytics, and marketing to embed user-centered design across the company.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior UX Manager or UX Research Manager with broad cross-functional experience
  • Director of UX, Design Director, or Head of UX at a mid-size product/company
  • Principal UX Researcher or Principal Interaction Designer with leadership experience

Advancement To:

  • VP of User Experience / VP of Design
  • Chief Experience Officer (CXO) / Chief Product Officer (CPO)
  • Head of Product + Experience for enterprise or multi-brand portfolios

Lateral Moves:

  • Director of Product Design
  • Director of Customer Experience (CX)
  • Head of Research & Insights

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Define and own the company-wide usability and UX strategy, translating business goals into a prioritized roadmap of research, optimization, and design initiatives that measurably improve task success, conversion rates, and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
  • Build, lead, and scale a multi-disciplinary usability organization (user researchers, UX designers, interaction designers, content strategists, accessibility specialists) including recruiting, performance management, career ladders, and professional development programs to retain top talent.
  • Design and operationalize a continuous usability testing program (lab, remote moderated, unmoderated, prototype, and A/B experiments) to iterate products on fast feedback cycles and validate design decisions with representative users.
  • Establish and standardize usability metrics and KPIs (SUS, task success, time-on-task, error rate, completion rate, CSAT, retention, conversion lift) and partner with data/analytics to instrument experiments and track impact against business outcomes.
  • Lead and execute large-scale user research programs (qualitative and quantitative) including ethnography, contextual inquiry, diary studies, intercept surveys, remote usability testing, and longitudinal research to surface deep user insights and unmet needs.
  • Drive accessibility strategy and compliance (WCAG 2.1/2.2 AA and beyond), embed accessibility into design and development workflows, oversee audits, remediation plans, and ensure assistive-technology compatibility across web and mobile products.
  • Create and maintain a scalable design system and pattern library that enforces usability best practices, accessibility, performance considerations, and brand consistency across product teams.
  • Partner with Product Management and Engineering to ensure usability requirements are included in product discovery, PRDs, acceptance criteria, and sprint planning; remove blockers to deliver intuitive, high-quality user experiences.
  • Champion user-centered design processes across the organization by facilitating design sprints, discovery workshops, usability heuristic evaluations, and co-creation sessions with cross-functional stakeholders.
  • Manage usability budgets, vendor relationships, and contracts for third-party research platforms, usability labs, accessibility tooling, and external design partners.
  • Translate complex usability research findings into clear, actionable recommendations and executive-level reports, including synthesis artifacts, journey maps, personas, and prioritized opportunity backlogs.
  • Oversee the integration of analytics and qualitative insights to identify friction points and optimize flows through data-driven experimentation and A/B testing (Optimizely, VWO, LaunchDarkly).
  • Ensure quality and consistency of interaction design deliverables including wireframes, high-fidelity prototypes (Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD), interaction specifications, and handoffs to engineering with acceptance criteria and usability test scripts.
  • Lead cross-functional governance for UX standards and design reviews, enabling product teams to maintain usability and accessibility standards while supporting speed of delivery.
  • Advocate for inclusive design and lead initiatives to design for diverse user populations, ensuring equity in experience for different abilities, languages, and contexts of use.
  • Mentor senior UX leaders and designers, conducting regular coaching, design critiques, and career planning; foster a culture of experimentation, psychological safety, and continuous learning.
  • Partner with Customer Support, Sales, and Marketing to integrate voice-of-customer (VOC) feedback into research priorities and product improvements that reduce support volume and increase customer lifetime value.
  • Lead post-launch usability monitoring and root-cause analysis of regression issues, quickly coordinating remediation and iterative improvements across product teams.
  • Define and maintain research ops and reusable templates, recruit and manage participant panels, and ensure ethical research practices and secure handling of user data.
  • Present usability insights and product recommendations to executive leadership, articulating ROI, risk, and trade-offs to influence product strategy and investment decisions.
  • Drive cross-product UX consistency for complex enterprise products or multi-platform experiences (web, iOS, Android, embedded systems), ensuring seamless end-to-end usability.
  • Identify emerging UX trends, tools, and methods (conversational UI, voice UX, AR/VR, generative AI) and advise on strategic adoption where it creates measurable user value.

Secondary Functions

  • Provide ad-hoc usability guidance to product squads during discovery and rapid prototyping phases to accelerate decision-making.
  • Support creation and maintenance of internal UX playbooks, heuristics checklists, design review templates, and research synthesis libraries.
  • Collaborate with legal, privacy, and security teams to ensure usability research and design comply with regulatory and data protection requirements.
  • Facilitate knowledge-sharing programs (lunch-and-learn, brown bags, internal UX showcases) to raise UX literacy across the organization.
  • Act as an escalation point for high-profile customer issues where usability impacts safety, security, or regulatory compliance.
  • Contribute thought leadership externally through conferences, blogs, and partnerships that raise the company’s profile as a leader in human-centered design.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep expertise in usability testing methods: lab testing, remote moderated/unmoderated testing, tree tests, card sorting, and guerrilla testing.
  • Strong user research capabilities: ethnography, contextual inquiry, diary studies, intercepts, and longitudinal research methods.
  • Proven experience designing and running A/B tests, multivariate experiments, and interpreting statistical results to drive UX decisions.
  • Accessibility proficiency: WCAG 2.1/2.2, screen reader testing, ARIA, color contrast tools, and remediation planning.
  • Design systems architecture and governance experience including tokens, components, versioning, and cross-platform consistency.
  • Advanced prototyping and interaction design skills using Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, Axure, or equivalent tools.
  • Experience with UX analytics and session replay tools (Hotjar, FullStory), product analytics (Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude), and experiment platforms (Optimizely, LaunchDarkly).
  • Strong competency with research ops tools and platforms (UserTesting, Lookback, dscout, Optimal Workshop) and participant recruitment best practices.
  • Ability to synthesize qualitative and quantitative data into clear artifacts (personas, journey maps, opportunity maps) and executable recommendations.
  • Familiarity with Agile development workflows, backlog management, JIRA/Confluence, and design-to-development handoff processes.
  • Basic understanding of front-end technologies (HTML/CSS/JS) to collaborate closely with engineering on feasibility and performance trade-offs.
  • Experience measuring and improving UX KPIs such as SUS, NPS, task success, completion time, conversion rate, and retention.

Soft Skills

  • Strategic leadership: ability to set long-term UX vision and align teams and stakeholders around priorities and measurable outcomes.
  • Influential communication and executive presence: translate complex user insights into concise, persuasive business cases for senior leadership.
  • Cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder management with product, engineering, analytics, marketing, and legal teams.
  • Coaching and talent development: mentor senior designers and researchers, foster career growth and continuous learning.
  • Strong facilitation skills for workshops, design sprints, and stakeholder alignment sessions.
  • High emotional intelligence, empathy for users and internal partners, and the capacity to drive consensus in ambiguous situations.
  • Data-informed decision-making balanced with qualitative judgment and design intuition.
  • Project and program management skills: setting milestones, managing scope, tracking ROI, and delivering outcomes on time.
  • Problem-solving orientation and a bias for action: iterate quickly, learn from experiments, and scale successful solutions.
  • Adaptability to fast-paced, evolving product priorities and ability to manage multiple initiatives simultaneously.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Cognitive Science, Psychology, Interaction Design, Industrial Design, Computer Science, or related field.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in HCI, Human Factors, Cognitive Psychology, Design, or MBA with portfolio demonstrating extensive UX leadership.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
  • Cognitive Psychology / Behavioral Science
  • Interaction Design / Visual Communication
  • Human Factors / Ergonomics
  • Information Architecture
  • Industrial Design

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 8–15+ years in UX, user research, or product design with 4+ years in leadership or director-level roles.

Preferred:

  • 10+ years of practical UX/research experience with proven track record building and scaling usability programs, leading cross-functional teams, demonstrating measurable impact on product KPIs (conversion, task success, NPS), and experience operating in enterprise or consumer-scale product environments.
  • Demonstrable portfolio of end-to-end design leadership, research case studies, accessibility initiatives, and examples of integrating UX strategy with business outcomes.
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