Interaction Design Lead
In a Nutshell
IDEO London is seeking an Interaction Design Lead with a passion for creating human-centred experiences and helping teams do their best work. You’ll lead and co-lead multidisciplinary teams, stay close to the craft, and guide clients from complex questions to tangible products and services. Your work will span digital and physical experiences, including new ways for people to interact with AI.
About IDEO London
We're a global design consultancy where curiosity, empathy, and solving complex challenges drive us. For over 40 years, we've partnered with clients to innovate in healthcare, mobility, education, retail, and beyond. Here, every challenge is a chance to grow, connect, and create impact.
Why is this role important for IDEO's work?
Interaction Design is at the heart of creating meaningful human-centred experiences that meet people’s needs and help businesses move forward. As an Interaction Design Lead, you’ll bring together craft, creative direction and project leadership to help teams turn strategy into experiences people can use. As AI becomes part of everyday products and services, you’ll help us explore how people understand, trust and stay in control of systems that can act on their behalf.
Once Here You Will
Lead and co-lead multidisciplinary project teams from research and framing through design, prototyping and delivery, balancing people’s needs, client goals and technical possibilities
Set a clear design direction and stay hands-on with journeys, flows, interfaces and interaction details, connecting individual touchpoints to a coherent product or service experience
Build and guide prototypes at the right fidelity to answer the team’s questions, using Figma, code and AI-assisted tools to make ideas tangible early and test them with people
Partner with researchers and technologists to plan experiments, test usability and accessibility, and use qualitative feedback and product data to refine designs and assess their impact
Explore conversational and agentic UX: design how people express intent, approve actions, understand what an AI system is doing, redirect it and recover when things go wrong
Own project plans, resource needs and delivery milestones; brief and delegate work clearly, spot obstacles early, and help the team navigate ambiguity while maintaining creative quality
Be a main client point of contact, facilitate working sessions and present compelling design narratives; align stakeholders on decisions, trade-offs and next steps
Help scope client challenges and shape proposals and follow-on opportunities with senior colleagues, drawing on project learnings and collaboration across Europe and beyond; travel as projects require
Mentor designers, give actionable craft feedback and build an inclusive team culture; share methods and learnings across our London community, including thoughtful use of AI that protects client and participant information
We're looking for someone with
6–8 years of professional experience in interaction design, digital product design, UX/UI or a related discipline, including 1–2+ years leading projects or multidisciplinary teams
Strong interaction design craft and a portfolio showing how you turn complex requirements into clear experiences; advanced expertise in one or more areas of digital, visual, service or systems design, with fluency across others
A strong grounding in human-centred design, research and usability testing, with the ability to guide a team from evidence to design decisions and measurable outcomes
The ability to scope, brief and delegate design work, manage timelines and resources, and empower a small to medium team to take ownership of different parts of a project
A keen eye for visual hierarchy, responsive interfaces, motion and micro-interactions, and the ability to critique work and offer clear, actionable feedback
Strong prototyping skills in Figma or comparable tools, and confidence experimenting with AI-assisted ideation…