UX Architect
Location: Hybrid / Onsite – Norfolk, VA (occasional office presence required)
Employment Type: Freelance (40 hours per week)
Engagement Dates: March 9, 2026 – September 9, 2026
Seeking a Freelance UX Architect to help design cohesive, multi-channel digital experiences for a major healthcare organization. This role focuses on complex authenticated and unauthenticated journeys across web, mobile, and conversational interfaces, tightly aligned with enterprise systems and APIs.
Responsibilities
- Define end-to-end experience architectures, including user journeys, channel strategies, and interaction models across web, mobile, and conversational AI.
- Map experience flows to backend systems, APIs, and integration patterns (including backend-for-frontend and aggregation layers).
- Design UI patterns for API-driven experiences, supporting asynchronous updates, partial data states, and resilient error handling.
- Shape and maintain reusable design systems and component architectures that scale across portals and mobile applications.
- Design experiences for asynchronous, event-driven workflows, including delayed processing, notifications, and reconciliation states.
- Incorporate AI-powered experience patterns such as chat/agent interactions, retrieval-based experiences, and human-in-the-loop flows.
- Ensure UX solutions meet accessibility and compliance standards (e.g., WCAG), with emphasis on healthcare and other regulated environments.
- Collaborate closely with enterprise, solution, and data architects, as well as engineering teams, to align UX with technical and performance constraints.
- Contribute to observability and measurement strategies for user journeys to support continuous optimization and experimentation.
Key Deliverables
- End-to-end journey maps linked to system integrations, data flows, and key touchpoints.
- Experience flow diagrams explicitly mapped to API contracts and service boundaries.
- Wireframes and interaction specifications documenting data dependencies, error states, and edge cases.
- Component-level UX specifications that extend or inform a cross-channel design system (web and native mobile).
- Authentication and identity experience flows (SSO, MFA, role-based views and entitlements).
- Patterns and guidelines for AI-powered interactions, including explainability and confidence indicators.
- Accessibility and compliance guidelines for the designed experiences, including testing approaches and acceptance criteria.
Required Skills & Experience
- Proven experience architecting multi-channel digital experiences (web, mobile, conversational/agent interfaces).
- Demonstrated ability to align UX architecture with backend systems, APIs, and integration approaches.
- Strong understanding of API-driven UI patterns, including:
- Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) and aggregation layers
- Asynchronous updates and streaming/partial responses
- Error handling, fallback, and degraded/partial data experiences
- Hands-on experience integrating UX with enterprise platforms:
- Identity and access management (SSO, MFA, role- and persona-based experiences)
- CRM and case management systems
- Data services and APIs in an enterprise environment
- Familiarity with AI/ML-driven UX patterns:
- Conversational interfaces and agent/assistant interactions
- Retrieval-grounded or knowledge-based experiences
- Human-in-the-loop validation and review workflows
- Explainability, confidence scores, and user trust cues
- Experience designing for asynchronous workflows:
- Event-driven updates and notifications
- Delayed backend processing
- Reconciliation, pending, and exception-handling states
- Strong background in defining and extending design systems and component libraries for cross-channel use.
- Knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG) and experience translating compliance requirements into UX patterns.
- Ability to produce technical UX artifacts, including:
- Journey maps tied to system integrations and backend capabilities
- Experience flows mapped to specific APIs and data contracts
- Wireframes with explicit data and state dependencies
- Interaction models for error, edge, and exception scenarios
- Proven collaboration with architects and engineers on:
- Authentication and authorization flows
- API and event contract design
- Instrumentation and observability of key user journeys
- Performance-aware UX design (latency, load, and resilience considerations)
This is a full-time freelance role embedded with product and engineering teams, with the expectation of occasional on-site collaboration in Norfolk, VA.
