Designer – Columbia University, New York, New York
Designer
Requisition no: 505461
Work type: Part Time
Location: Morningside
School/Department: Graduate School of Journalism
Grade: Grade 13
Categories: Other
Position Summary
The David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation was founded in 2012 and is a joint effort between Stanford’s School of Engineering and Columbia Journalism School (CJS). Each year, the Brown Institute awards close to $1M in grants and fellowships to foster new tools and modes of expression, and to create stories that escape the bounds of page and screen. We are committed to radical experimentation with the potential to define new priorities and practices for both engineering and journalism.
The Brown Institute at Columbia Journalism School is overseeing a newly-funded Local News Initiative. As the first of a number of anticipated projects under this umbrella, we will develop an open source “smart” paywall that deploys Machine Learning (ML) to go beyond one-size-fits-all approaches to audience engagement. The Designer will be primarily responsible for designing the UI/UX components of the system.
Through the deployment of ML in this way, we aim to provide small-to-medium sized news organizations with tools to help strengthen their subscriber base. We explicitly extend the idea of a paywall to include a variety of actions that a publisher can take to engage their readers and encourage subscription. We focus on the formalism of a paywall as it is the place where business, newsroom and reader needs all meet — it can become a place of creativity and innovation.
Our approach will involve experimentation both with the type of actions open to the paywall, as well as the set of reader-level data used to formulate ML-based optimizations, estimating the probability of a reader subscribing in response to one of the actions. The actual ML scheme employed, complete with training data, also requires thought — for example, making sure that our choices are ethical, providing predictions that are explainable to editor and reader alike.
In terms of specific deliverables, the development of the “smarter” smart paywall will create 1) a platform that applies ML to the basic metering operation of a traditional paywall by adapting how many pages a reader sees before the paywall engages, 2) up to two more forms of reader engagement, with operations that are also optimized via ML and dynamic experimentation, and 3) a user interface for scripting paywall actions and engaging with the ML application — this includes collecting data, performing experiments and eventually launching at scale. All code will be Open Source and there will be options for easy deployment via APIs and custom machine instances.
This is a part-time, externally funded position, contingent on performance and the continued availability of funding.
Responsibilities
Primarily responsible for designing the UI/UX components of the system and will serve as the “authority” on the topic among the development team members. The designer must have experience specifying and implementing the user interface for complex software systems.
Participate in design processes to help specify the functionality of the overall paywall system, and assess the range of IT infrastructures in newsrooms on top of which the product needs to function.
Create the project’s formal specifications, and set technical milestones. The designer will be assigned specific tasks and will be responsible for their timely completion.
This is a part-time, externally funded position, contingent on performance and the continued availability of funding.
Minimum Qualifications
Education: Bachelor’s Degree required. Advanced degree preferred.
Experience: 4+ years experience with complex software projects and knowledge of basic product design strategies. Extensive experience with UI/UX design. Basic knowledge of ML. Experience working in a small team of developers.
Experience participating in complex software development projects, and be familiar with basic design processes to elicit product requirements from a user community.
Preferred Qualifications
Has experience with software for newsrooms is desirable but not required.
Experience in product design and implementation is important, familiarity with the news industry is desirable but not required.
Equal Opportunity Employer / Disability / Veteran
Columbia University is committed to the hiring of qualified local residents.