Staff Interaction Designer

About the job

Applies advanced expertise in interaction design, visual design, and motion to create intuitive, accessible, and consistent experiences across complex enterprise software products. Develops solutions aligned with Cisco Design Thinking Principles, with a focus on simplification, usability, and user experience.

Partners with Product Design, Design Systems, Engineering, Research, and Product Management to address complex usability challenges and establish scalable interaction patterns. Uses advanced prototyping techniques to explore, validate, and communicate interaction concepts, ensuring that motion and interface behaviors improve user comprehension, navigation, and efficiency.

Provides design leadership across multiple product areas, influences interaction design practices and standards, and mentors other designers to elevate the overall quality and consistency of product experiences.

What You'll Do

• Uses specialized expertise in interaction design, visual design, and motion to solve complex user experience challenges and recommend best practices across products.
• Leads the design of sophisticated interactions, transitions, and interface behaviors that improve usability, wayfinding, feedback, and user comprehension.
• Applies strong visual design principles and exceptional attention to detail to create intuitive, consistent, and high-quality product experiences.
• Identifies opportunities to simplify complex workflows and information-dense interfaces through thoughtful interaction design and purposeful motion.
• Leads interaction design initiatives spanning multiple product teams, balancing user needs, technical feasibility, accessibility, and business objectives.
• Influences product design direction by identifying opportunities for innovation and advocating for interaction improvements that address customer needs.
• Partners with Design Systems teams to establish and evolve reusable interaction patterns, motion principles, and component behaviors, improving consistency and scalability across products.
• Explores innovative approaches to data visualization and interactive dashboards, helping users interpret complex information, understand changes, and navigate between different levels of detail.
• Creates advanced interactive prototypes to communicate design intent, evaluate interaction concepts, and support design and engineering decisions.
• Collaborates closely with Engineering to translate interaction concepts into production-ready experiences, considering implementation constraints, performance, and accessibility.
• Defines and documents interaction specifications, behavioral guidelines, and motion patterns to support consistent implementation across teams.
• Articulates and advocates for design decisions based on user needs, usability principles, product context, and technical considerations.
• Establishes success criteria and partners with Research and Product teams to evaluate interaction effectiveness through usability testing, customer feedback, and relevant product metrics.
• Mentors and coaches designers, strengthening interaction design, motion, visual craft, and advanced prototyping capabilities across the organization.
• Facilitates knowledge sharing through design critiques, workshops, demonstrations, and cross-functional collaboration.
• Explores emerging design technologies, including AI-assisted prototyping and design-to-code workflows, to improve design exploration and collaboration with Engineering.
• 
  

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree with 8+ years of related professional experience, Master's degree with 6+ years, or equivalent practical experience in Interaction Design, Product Design, UX Design, or a related discipline.
• Demonstrated expertise in designing and delivering sophisticated interactions and high-quality visual experiences for digital products.
• Advanced conceptual and practical knowledge of interaction design principles, including affordances, feedback, interface states, transitions, information hierarchy, and progressive disclosure.
• Strong understanding of motion design principles and their application to functional, production-ready user interfaces.
• Advanced proficiency in Figma and experience developing high-fidelity interactive prototypes to explore and communicate complex interface behaviors.
• Strong portfolio demonstrating exceptional visual craft, thoughtful interaction design, purposeful motion, and experience delivering solutions in real products.
• Experience working with design systems, reusable components, and interaction patterns across multiple product areas.
• Understanding of accessibility principles, including designing for reduced motion, performance, and diverse user needs.
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex design initiatives, influence cross-functional decisions, and collaborate effectively with Product Management, Engineering, and Research.
• Experience mentoring other designers, communicating design rationale, and contributing to improved design practices across teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing complex enterprise software, B2B SaaS applications, developer tools, or data-intensive products.
• Experience designing interactions for data visualizations, analytical dashboards, or complex information exploration workflows.
• Familiarity with frontend technologies, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, and SVG, and an understanding of how interactions and animations are implemented in production applications.
• Experience building functional prototypes using code or advanced prototyping tools such as Framer, ProtoPie, Rive, or similar technologies.
• Experience contributing to or influencing design systems, particularly interaction guidelines, motion standards, and component behaviors.
• Experience establishing interaction design practices, coaching other designers, and raising design quality across multiple teams.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted design, rapid prototyping, and design-to-code workflows.

Why Cisco?

At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.

Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere.

We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.