Product Designer

Join us as the first design hire at School Space, and help us build our product out from scratch!

We’re looking for someone to start soon, 3 days a week, initially for a 3 to 4 month period.

ABOUT US
School Space is a social enterprise helping to fight the education funding crisis by working with schools to rent out their facilities to the local community. The income generated is used by the schools to improve the educational experience and facilities for their students, in addition to building stronger connections with the surrounding community.

We are currently a team of ten, split across London and Oxford. We’d prefer you to work from our London HQ, in Hoxton, but are open to remote work arrangements.

ROLE
School Space’s digital presence has so far consisted of an agency-built Wordpress site combined with some Typeforms and Google Forms. With a couple of developers now onboard, we are just starting to build out our own booking platform from scratch, which will include a new frontend for our customers and schools, as well as an app for our on-site staff to help facilitate the bookings.

We’re looking for a versatile designer to help drive the early product development and lay the foundations for School Space’s digital future. Specifically, the role will involve:

• Working with our team to iteratively conceive, prototype, build, deliver, and test our new product.
• Evolution of our branding for digital, and establishing the foundations of our frontend (e.g logos, colour, palette, typography, building up a digital style guide).
• Conducting user research, meeting customers and schools, and getting out there to test our work with users.
• UX: Venue searching (think Airbnb), flows to schedule and manage bookings (both one-off and more complex recurring bookings), as well as account creation/management.
• UI: Designing customer and school interfaces, as well as email templates, with a focus on building a uniform design system and component library.
• Helping us to develop a modern product development process, with best practices and modern tools.

You will be working alongside the CTO and another developer, both of whom are passionate about building great user experiences. We are also keen to develop our skills in this area, so finding someone happy to upskill us a bit would be great too.

EXPERIENCE
We are looking for someone with some experience designing:

• High-quality digital products, preferably in a startup.
• Applications involving bookings, subscriptions, or similar complexity.
• Interfaces for a broad range of users, some with fairly low digital confidence.
• Applications where trust is crucial, this is key for our schools and our customers.
• Components for modern web development (we use React).
• With modern tools and practices (e.g Sketch, Zeplin, Invision, Marvel or similar).

In terms of an approach, you’d be a good fit if you work along the following lines:

• A focus on people and usability first. Most often it will be what works best for the user that will prevail, not what looks the most stylish.
• Happy working in an agile and iterative development process, being well integrated with the tech team, and keeping the wider team involved.
• Data-driven, challenging assumptions and testing things we don’t know.
• Preference for working with design systems that encourage uniformity.

Please apply with a short introduction and one or two paragraphs about your relevant experience.