Interaction / Service Designer

We are seeking a design practitioner to join our team in the San Francisco studio. Our company helps organizations tackle challenging experience-focused, human-centered, and strategic problems—anything from orchestrating a highly complex healthcare or financial experience across multiple channels to improving the already phenomenal success of Twitter.

At Adaptive Path, you will get to work on projects like:

We approach our work differently than many design and consulting firms. We are driven by a commitment to excellent design practice rather than pure profit—our design activities drive our business rather than the other way around. Our mission is to work with great organizations to create positive impact in the world. To do this, we believe in bringing together highly talented people and setting up an environment that helps them unleash their awesomeness.  

Our culture is based on three key ideals

Highly-talented people: All our practitioners are outstanding by most other organizations' standards. They have a significant degree of expertise in a broad range of design-related and consulting skills. More than being passionate about design, they are passionate about the impact design can have in the world. They are sincere, self-motivated, and entrepreneurial. Every practitioner at Adaptive Path is client-facing because everyone is a mature, capable, well-rounded superstar. This means we are highly selective in the projects we take on. We take only about 40% of the projects that come through the door—the ones that are most creatively challenging and have the potential for the highest positive impact in the world.

Limited structure: We are small, nimble, focused, and autonomous. Other firms have a lot of organizational structure, using creative directors as the main client contact and large teams of junior-level staff to do the work, usually on many projects at one time. Here, we don't have a lot of organizational hierarchy and management. Our project teams are small and practitioners are generally dedicated to one project at a time. That focus makes happier designers and results in higher quality work for clients, with very little of the traditional oversight found in most other design firms.

Improving, learning, and sharing: On an individual level, we set aside specific budget and time for practitioners to reflect on, refine, and improve their skills. On an organizational level, we also spend a lot of energy sharing our knowledge with others. We run two highly successful design conferences (UX Week and MX: Managing Experience) as well as public and in-house trainings internationally (UX Intensive, Good Design Faster). We also encourage our staff to speak and write about their particular passions within our field. Many of them play key roles in all the creative communities that touch on experience design. They write books, organize events, speak and teach widely about what they do. Sharing our successes, failures, and ideas makes everyone in our space smarter and makes us better at what we do.

Desired skills & experience

We are looking for energetic, passionate, flexible, and highly-talented people. Recent design program graduates with a couple years of work experience would be ideal. You should have experience in or a deep familiarity with:

Besides those specific skill areas, candidates should have a portfolio that includes pieces of multiple platforms and devices and at least 2 years of professional experience as an interaction designer or equivalent. Skills in sketching, illustration, visual design, qualitative/ethnographic research, coding, physical computing, modeling, industrial design, etc. are highly desirable as well. Strong communication skills, sincerity, and a sense of humor are crucial in our highly collaborative environment. We collaborate not only with each other but with our client teams too. You must also appreciate ambiguity and value creative conflict in support of strong design.

If this sounds like you, please drop us a line.

How to apply

Please email jobs AT adaptivepath DOT com if you are interested in this position. Please include your resume, pointer to an online portfolio or PDF, and your thoughts on working with us.