Overview
Nuance is the leading provider of speech recognition solutions that are redefining the way the world communicates over the telephone, in the car, and with handheld devices. The Multimodal Applications Group group provides cutting-edge, user-centered discovery, design, development, and optimization services for products and prototypes of multimodal applications. The applications that Nuance deploys are used by millions of average consumers every day, who use everyday spoken English to conduct their personal business with corporations, government institutions, hospitals, and schools.
When you join this group, you'll be joining an interdisciplinary, results-oriented, client-focused consulting group that America's largest organizations trust to define their customers' experience. We are comprised of product developers, speech technology scientists, designers, cognitive scientists, project managers, business analysts, and systems architects. We deploy systems that deliberately “wow†users by exceeding their expectations and flow so seamlessly that users prefer to use our applications over most other modalities, including dealing with live agents. We discover, defend, and optimize the user's experience to maximize our client's technology investment. We do this while adhering to rigorous client schedules, frequently moving a project from conception through deployment in four months or less.
Responsibilities
Speech represents the next great leap forward in control of personal devices. As a UI Designer, you will create a successful experience in this new medium for tens of thousands of users each day. You may design graphical user interfaces the fit well with the idiosyncracies of the particular device types, and voice user interfaces that work seamlessly with the GUIs. Your designs will have fallback and error-recovery strategies that are easy to understand and can be generalized across applications. They will cater to beginner users and expert users alike, with such personalization features being used as much as possible where possible. You will be responsible for discovering and designing for all boundary conditions which these applications must deal with, whether they stem from user behavior, device behavior or recognition behaviour. In performing these tasks, you will apply industry-leading standards for user engagement, expert knowledge of speech recognition, synthesis, and dialog technology, and professional intuition about what it takes to actively engage a user and build a reciprocal sense of collaboration within the various device interactions. You will run the necessary wizard-of-oz testing, usability trials, de-brief sessions and develop questionnaires needed to proper address user expections in ways that are credible to our customers. As a Designer, you'll be expected to complement the vision of our clients and Design Leaders, while always providing your own critical perspective on maximizing users' and clients' success. You will need to move quickly and easily from one engagement to the next, be comfortable multi-tasking, and be able to adapt your sense of what's best to a variety of team philosophies. Your successes will be measured both by business targets your applications reach or surpass, and the positive impression your efforts leave in the minds of users.
Qualifications
- Under the direction of Design Leaders, Product Management Leaders and Product Development Managers:
- Contribute to effective graphical and speech user interface designs, specifying application flow, dialogs, and help
- Ensure the integrity of our specifications: modifying them to satisfy evolving client requirements; detailing recognizer & dialog manager behavior; and coordinating visual, detail, and conversational views on these specifications
- Assist in implementing these designs, including interacting with developers, directing voice talents, processing audio, and QA'ing prompt inventories and applications
- Define, organize, execute, and report on Usability Tests for a wide variety of applications
- Analyze performance of the user interface in the field and recommend specific changes to improve user satisfaction and transaction completion.
- Implement desirable design changes discovered in usability and in the field
- Use your experience on your specific projects to augment our evolving body of best practices.
- The ability to create and manage large complicated documents with precision and style.
- Pro-actively manage your billable time, to optimize your availability for multiple projects
You must supply the following credentials:
- BS or equivalent experience in human factors engineering, product interface design, cognitive science, experimental psychology, technical writing, or a similar degree
- Either a Master's degree in Human Factors/CHI, technical writing, OR 2+ years industry experience in user-centered design or data analysis
- Experience with multimodal devices, phones, PDAs and other
- Native-level English fluency
- Experience in usability testing
- Ability to travel within the U.S. and Canada up to four days per month
- Willingness to work day-to-day in one of Nuance's offices in Burlington or Montreal
- Creativity and a sense of fun
- Be able to actively participate as an individual contributor, but be comfortable working under the direction of a Design Leaders
- Strong Microsoft Windows skills, including MS Office
Strong candidates will also have the following: - Professional or college-level experience with speech recognition software and/or involving telephony
- Experience with Natural Language speech user interface design
- Demonstrable audio engineering experience and flair
- Professional writing experience
- Experience working in a recording studio, as or with professional voice talent
- Programming skills in Perl and/or various Web technologies
- Fluency in other languages would be a plus