Explorers. Leaders. Risk takers. These are the types of people our pets inspire us to be every day. And there's no better place for them than on our PetSmart Innovation team. As a member of our Innovation team, you'll have the exciting opportunity to imagine and create the next generation of PetSmart. Whether you're creating new customer experiences through mobile solutions or developing new technologies that help bring the PetSmart story to life, you'll play an integral role in transforming the way pet parents and their pets interact with our brand. From ideation and building prototypes to in-store testing, you'll collaborate with brilliant experts in an agile and dynamic fast-paced culture that not only invites and encourages innovation, but thrives on it. And we'll continuously provide you with the tools, training, and resources you need as you help us create more moments for people to be inspired by pets.
The Innovation Designer role is for a visionary artist who can create illustrative concepts from broad ranging concepts. In this position, you will be a member of the innovation team and will visualize concepts in an iterative design approach. These concepts will be represented from storyboard format to wireframe to mockup to prototype design. The goal of the innovation designer is to enable the product owner to get a visual sense of what is being proposed early in the process and on a regular basis.
The designer will stay one (1) sprint cycle ahead of the developers so that visual and functional concepts can be refined prior to coding. Functional mock-ups are a valuable tool that this position will create.
Essential duties and responsibilities also include:
• Lead the design efforts for innovation, from early concept to final prototype.
• Utilize tools that enable quick (low cost, short time frame, etc) mockup of clickable concepts to test design concepts and help developers define how and what they need to implement for a user story
• Partner with the Creative team to use company design guidelines, but at times, will be asked to create new concepts that may be radically different from any current design.
• Participate in the Scrum meetings to ensure we have user story alignment with customer expectations.
• Partner with developers.
• Rapidly validate concepts prior to prototype development to help focus development efforts.
• Create presentation materials for any demonstration or presentation on the concepts.
• Responsible for the concept design UX and UI.
The ideal candidate will have experience in an agile, iterative environment focused on innovation development. He/she will have an innate curiosity regarding where trends are going (consumer usage, technology, etc) and will want to drive PetSmart to make people's lives better.
To qualify for this position, a bachelor's degree from a four-year college or university or direct related experience in innovation design; or equivalent combination of education and experience is required along with prior hands-on experience in visual aspects for deployment to mobile devices.