Job description
Role Overview
Lead Experience (CX) Designer at Al Tayer Group. The Lead Experience Designer is the craft lead of Al Tayer Insignia's Experience Design practice, translating experience strategy into concrete, tested design work across physical, digital, and phygital touchpoints.
Company Overview
Al Tayer Insignia has partnered with the world's most iconic brands for over 40 years, creating award-winning retail experiences across boutiques, department stores, and leading online platforms. The company operates stores and outlets across the GCC with a seamless omnichannel presence, bringing style, innovation, and heritage together.
Role Purpose
The Lead Experience Designer turns the vision for brands' differentiating experiences into detailed journey maps, service blueprints, and prototypes that teams across the business can act on, all designed with clear and relevant customer and stakeholder personas in mind. The role builds and maintains the detailed evidence base that brings customer intelligence, voice of customer, and journey insight to life as tangible, testable design work across each phase of end-to-end customer journeys.
Key Responsibilities
Strategy & Design Craft
- Contribute design craft expertise to the Head of Experience Design's roadmap, ensuring strategic priorities are translated into detailed, actionable design work.
- Help define and maintain design methodology, standards, and documentation as the Experience Design practice scales.
- Translate world-class brand DNA and brand strategies into inspiring and differentiating experiences.
- Bring customer intelligence, trends, and journey insight into the design process, ensuring interventions are grounded in evidence rather than assumption.
- Design signature moments that balance creative differentiation with commercial impact.
Project Delivery & Execution
- Run ambitious design projects seamlessly, following the end-to-end design process.
- Build detailed customer journey maps and service blueprints per brand, segment, and touchpoint.
- Design and prototype clienteling tools, front-liner and sales associate interfaces, and customer-facing experience concepts, particularly for top brands and Amber.
- Serve as the primary design partner on Amber's clienteling platform and other priority experience initiatives, shaping both member-facing journeys and front-liner/sales associate tools.
- Ensure designs are grounded in real customer and store needs.
- Deploy Design Thinking methodologies in day-to-day project work, onboarding stakeholders to the approach where needed.
- Maintain design documentation and playbooks to ensure consistency and reusability across brands.
Research & Evidence
- Collaborate with Customer Intelligence to run qualitative research, including shop-alongs, staff interviews, mystery shopping input, and concept testing, to feed design decisions.
- Support the Head of Experience Design and Customer Intelligence team in tracking and continuously improving key journeys.
Stakeholder Collaboration
- Collaborate with a wide variety of functions and enablers to ensure designs are co-created, generate strong buy-in, and get implemented as intended.
- Work closely with brand and vertical stakeholders, Digital and product teams, and IT.
- Work closely with store teams, customer care, and other customer-facing roles to keep design grounded in operational reality.
- Fully understand product roles and collaborate seamlessly with product teams.
- Comfortable presenting work to senior stakeholders and cross-functional teams.
- Support the design agenda for reinventing experiential retail formats, including Department Stores, online flagships, Amber, and new concepts.
People & Practice Development
- Mentor and provide craft guidance to other designers, interns, or agency resources working on Experience Design projects.
- Collaborate closely with the Head of Experience Design to build out the wider Experience Design team as it grows.
- Act as a design role model to stakeholders beyond the immediate team, helping build design literacy across the business.
- Support the Head of Experience Design in shaping the playbooks, capabilities, and strategic avenues required to establish a strong and impactful Experience Design function.
Qualifications & Experience
- Academic background in Design, Creative, UX/Service Design, or related field.
- 4-7 years in CX/Service Design and UX Design, ideally in luxury retail, hospitality, or premium omnichannel environments.
- CCXP or UX-related credentials are a plus.
Skills & Competencies
- Strong fluency in journey mapping, service blueprinting, and prototyping tools, including Figma or equivalent.
- Experience with no-code prototyping such as bolt.new is a bonus.
- Ability to work across physical and digital touchpoints, not just screens.
- Experience in UX design and UI as well as prototyping.
- Comfort running qualitative research and translating findings into design decisions.
- Strong documentation habits, able to produce design artefacts others can act on.
- Ability to work autonomously on detailed craft while staying aligned to broader strategic direction.
- Master empathy and need states analysis.
- Ability to understand unique brand strategies and design the corresponding moments and journeys in context.
- Strong critical thinking and creative abilities.
- Hands-on designer with strong communication skills.
Additional Information
- Reporting into the Head of Experience Design.