Freelance Surface Pattern Designer Jobs in Michigan

Role Summary:

We are seeking a Senior UX Product Designer to help shape the next generation of AI-powered experiences across our product ecosystem. In this role, you will work at the intersection of user experience, product strategy, and applied AI, translating complex model capabilities into intuitive, trustworthy, and high-impact workflows. You will define how humans collaborate with AI-designing the interactions, feedback loops, transparency moments, and control surfaces that make AI feel both powerful and reliable.

You will partner closely with product management, product engineering, and data science to build experiences that balance innovation with responsible AI practices. This role is ideal for a designer who thrives in ambiguity, understands the unique behaviors and constraints of AI systems, and can convert them into clear, user-centered solutions.

About the Role

As a Sr. UX Designer, you will:

• Lead the end-to-end design of AI-powered features, including agentic workflows, generative interactions, and human-in-the-loop systems

• Translate model behaviors, data inputs, and system limitations into coherent UX patterns that drive user trust and product adoption.

• Prototype with real AI/LLM models to evaluate user prompts, improve model responses, and inform product direction.

• Map and design collaboration patterns between users and AI-defining when AI acts autonomously, when humans take control, and how handoffs occur.

• Create clear interaction flows that incorporate transparency moments, safety guardrails, override options, and recovery states.

• Partner with data science and engineering to shape model requirements, evaluate performance constraints, and align system behaviors with user needs.

• Partner with UX Researchto run usability testing and AI-specific validation studies to understand user mental models, trust factors, and interaction expectations.

• Leverage qualitative and quantitativedata to runevaluative studies for AI features (e.g., prompt/response quality, hallucination risk, trust sign)

• Contribute to internal design standards for AI patterns, prompt design guidelines, evaluation criteria, and UX quality benchmarks.

• Collaborate with product and research teams toidentifynew opportunities where AI can meaningfully improve outcomes for users.

• Communicate design decisions with clarity, influence senior stakeholders, and guide teams through ambiguous or evolving problem spaces.

• Leverage AI tooling and internal content standards to deliver clear, concise,brandaligned product experiences.

• Design accessible solutions and collaborate with the Accessibility team to ensure WCAG 2.1 AA compliance, using AI checks alongside expert review.

About You

You're a fit for this role if you have:

• 6+ years of professional product design experience with a strong portfoliodemonstratingend-to-end ownership of complex workflows.

• Experience designing with AI or LLM technologies, including prompt design, generative UX, and evaluating model output quality.

• Strong interaction design skills with the ability to simplify ambiguous AI behaviors into predictable, user-centered experiences.

• Familiarity with model behaviors and limitations-hallucinations, confidence levels, deterministic vs. probabilistic output, and data quality impacts.

• Ability to prototype using tools such as Figma, Python notebooks, model sandboxes, or no-code AI orchestration tools.

• Hands-on experience planning and executing end-to-end user research-definingobjectives, recruiting participants, moderating studies (interviews, usability tests, surveys, concept/validation), synthesizing insights, and translating findings into roadmap and design decisions.

• Deep systems-thinking skills and comfortdesigningacross multiple layers: UI, data inputs, model constraints, and operational workflows.

• Experience collaborating with product management, product engineering, data science, product analytics, user research, content design, accessibility, UX engineering in high-velocity, cross-functional teams.

• Strong communicationand storytelling skills-able to influence decisions and articulate the "why" behind design choices.

• Commitment to responsible AI principles, including transparency, fairness, and user empowerment.

• A growth mindset, comfort navigating ambiguity, andan enthusiasmfor experimenting with emerging technologies.

Bonus

• Ability to design intuitive search, drafting, and review workflows-especially those involving complex knowledge structures or trust-critical decision moments.

• Comfort working with model-evaluation tooling, analytics dashboards, and prompt or version-management systems to understand and refine AI behavior.

• Strength in shaping information architecture for large-scale content ecosystems, including clear citation patterns, confidence signals, and quality indicators.

• Familiarity with domain-heavy environments-such as newsroom tooling, legal research, tax and compliance, risk and fraud, or financial analysis-and the abilityto translate complexity into usable experiences.

• Experience shipping zero-to-one products, iterating rapidly through ambiguity to test hypotheses, derisk bets, and accelerate productmarket fit.

#LI-DS4