Just a quick pointer towards a vacancy that’s arisen here at Sage for a Senior Usability Specialist. The job is based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and the description is below.

If you’re interested, send your CV and covering email to joinus@sage.com.

“An exciting opportunity has arisen within our Small Business Division (SBD) R&D team for a Senior Usability Specialist. This is a key role for someone with passion and flair for usability to continually drive the maximum benefit of the discipline to our customers, through our products.

You’ll be expected to champion usability within the R&D and Product Management teams, while driving the development of your team’s usability capability and skills. This means that strong communication and influencing skills are essential to ensure maximum benefit is gained from the usability discipline throughout the SDLC. You will also act as an authority on usability representing the SBD team across the UK region.

You will have Usability experience across the SDLC, ideally in multiple platforms (e.g. desktop, web and mobile), and your excellent theoretical and practical knowledge of user-centred design will mean you are comfortable engaging directly with users.

You will have a direct role in the design of our products which will require a solid understanding of usability issues and best practices combined with a genuine creative flair for design. You will work hand-in-hand with Business Analysts, Developers and Testers, refining and iterating your designs to provide the best possible user experience for our customers.

We’re looking for someone who is highly motivated to achieve, a strong leader and good team player, with a solid experience in usability engineering throughout the product development cycle. You’ll have a proven track record in the software development lifecycle, coupled with experience in rapid prototyping and user-centred design.

We see usability as a key differentiator for our product in the market and are increasingly placing it at the centre of everything we do. Our usability specialists are therefore in a unique position to influence the direction of our products.

If you want to join a respected team working on a strong product with a growing customer base, this could be the role for you.”