Lead UX Designer 👩💻
At A Glance Details
Contract hours: 35 hours.
Contract type: Permanent.
Flexibility: We offer flexible core hours and are currently working on a 9-day fortnight work pattern.
Location: This role will operate primarily on a remote basis however occasional travel to our office in Scotland will be required.
About Us 👋
Our journey began with Chris, Founder and CEO of Estendio/Present Pal, discovering a major real-life challenge in university as a dyslexic student.
Fast forward to today, we’re supporting disabled students to deliver more confident and prepared presentations in over 150 universities across the UK and US, growing to a profitable and self-sustaining business along the way.
Accessibility, as one of our key company values, is at the heart of everything we do and we are in the process of establishing a second SaaS accessibility product with significant high growth potential within a number of markets.
If you’re ready to help a brilliant team who are all committed to levelling the playing field through innovative tech then we’d love to talk to you!
About The Job 💼
It’s a really exciting time for us as we are moving into a new product focused around accessibility. We’re looking for a Lead UX Designer who’ll help us drive this new product forward with best in class research and a hands on approach to raising the bar with everything design based at Estendio.
You'll report to Linda, our Director of Product, and you'll be part of a small, incredibly creative and fast paced team delivering on an ambitious strategy.
Your focus will be on how best to design and build our brand new product as well as optimising on our current user experience.
What You’ll Be Doing
UX design: You’ll be responsible for ensuring that the UX of all our products is to the highest standard.
This will mean spending time in the problem space, conducting research and user testing, and delivering your own exceptional quality designs, creating wireframes and prototypes.
Working closely with our developers, you’ll then ensure that our designs are implemented correctly.
Design leadership: You’ll be mentoring our Senior UX Designer who is mainly focused on the UI of our product, and ensuring that design standards and processes are consistently applied across the company.
Design strategy: You’ll be responsible for developing and executing a design strategy that aligns with our overall goals and vision.
This means conducting user research and interviews, defining user personas, and creating design principles and guidelines.
Product design: You’ll be responsible for overseeing the design of all our products, from concept through to launch.
This means working closely with various stakeholders across our teams to ensure that design requirements are met, and a user-centred culture focused on customer needs is championed.
Design operations: You’ll be responsible for managing the design team's workflow and ensuring that design projects are delivered on time and to the highest standard.
Skills and Experience 💡
You’ll be successful in this role if:
You’ve plenty experience working as a Senior or Lead UX Designer, working in an inhouse UX team and alongside a development team.
You have a strong understanding of the whole design process - from initial problem framing, through user research, to ideating and creative design and final handover to the development team. You’ll be very comfortable supporting design projects from concept to completion.
Your background includes conducting end-to-end user research studies from planning and recruitment to execution (using a variety of research methods), analysis and delivery.
You’re very proficient in UX sketching and creating both low-fidelity wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes.
You’re easily able to make design decisions and ask the tough questions that will help surface and challenge assumptions.
You’re comfortable using Figma and preferably also Adobe XD.
You’ve got good experience of running workshops as a way of bringing people together to align on a problem.
It would be a great advantage if you also had:
Experience of a tech company's startup to scaleup journey.
An understanding of neurodiversity and ADD and the impact this has on learning experiences.
Experience of coaching and mentoring a small team of designers with a focus on sharing learnings to drive improvements.
About You 😄
You’ll have an incredible eye for design and be a real master of your craft with a portfolio to prove it.
You’ll thrive being part of an early-stage startup, with all the challenges, ambiguity and excitement that brings. Ideally you’ll have worked in an agile environment and can bring your mindset and experience to help us progress the ways we’re working.
Empathy will come naturally to you and you’ll be highly curious as to why something isn’t working. You’ll love uncovering problems and then translating insights into great designs which actually make an impact on the user.
You’ll bring a positive energy to the company team dynamic - we are a small but close team so you’ll be someone who works in a self directed but very collaborative way, bringing others with you.
Adaptability is one of our key values so you’ll need resilience to cope in a fast paced environment, a can-do attitude and the ability to roll your sleeves up wherever required!
You’ll be ambitious for growth both personally and for Estendio - we’re learning all the time so you’ll be passionate about sharing knowledge and personal development.
It would be great if you had an interest in accessibility and a keen interest in levelling the playing field through tech.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the heart of who we are and what we do. We encourage applications from all backgrounds and communities and we are happy to discuss any reasonable adjustments that you require.
We also recognise the many talents and advantages of being neurodivergent so we are very open to applicants with neurological differences at Estendio.
Finally, we’ll still consider applications which don’t meet every single one of our criteria so don’t be put off if you don’t match them perfectly.
Our Benefits 💕
Salary: let us know your expectations and we’ll be happy to chat.
A generous holiday allowance of 33 days.
Flexibility: we operate a core hours flexi system and are currently operating under a 9-day fortnight work pattern so that we have every second Friday off.
EMI share options - we want everyone to have a share of the success!
Company pension scheme.
Wellbeing cashback plan - we know how important wellbeing is to happiness at work and we’ll help you cover some of the costs of everyday healthcare needs as well as a lot of 'nice to haves’.
Fantastic personal development growth opportunities - you’ll learn an incredible amount on the job and you’ll get exposure to every part of the business.
The opportunity to work with an incredible bunch of folk who are committed to making a real impact through tech for good - and having some fun along the way!
Assistive technology support package - we mean what we say about accessibility and we're happy to look at any reasonable adjustments you might need either within the recruitment process or when you're working with us.
Our Recruitment Process ✨
First and foremost, we’re absolutely committed to helping you to be your best through our process, so if you need any adjustments for the recruitment process please let us know. We have a 3 stage process to make sure we’re getting the right people to join our team.
Stage 1
First, we’ll schedule a quick informal chat with the hiring manager to work out if we think at this stage we are a good fit for each other.
Stage 2
If this goes well then we follow up with a second stage interview to talk more about your skills and personal attributes - we’ll also set you a design task for this stage which shouldn't take more than 1.5 hours of your personal time. We also include in this stage a culture fit focus where we really zone in on our company values and make sure we’re really well aligned to each other.
Stage 3
Lastly, we aim to meet people face to face so that we can properly see how we interact together in a more human way. This is usually by way of an informal coffee meeting with one or two of the team.
Interviews are a two-way process and at all stages you can ask as many questions as you want to find out about us!
If you think this role is a great fit for you please send us your CV, portfolio and a cover note explaining why you are interested to lorna@presentpal.co.uk