Radical I/O Technology Inc. Looking for UX/UI Designer, remote within Canada only, FT or PT at Vancouver, BC Full Time

Hiya! We’re Radical I/O, a people-first enterprise software development consultancy and lab that develops technology with purpose. We work with cities and organizations to develop meaningful, data-driven solutions that provide people with easy access to information, when and where they need it.

We are now focusing on our new SimpliCity SaaS platform for Canadian municipalities that is currently in development with our first early adopter customer. SimpliCity is the combination of a flexible API-first headless CMS, a content creation web console, and a highly performant Canadian cloud-hosted website publishing platform to support municipal digital transformation goals.

THE POSITION

We’re on the lookout for a skilled Intermediate or Senior UX/UI Designer with experience researching, solutioning, and designing larger B2B and B2C web and mobile apps with functional and delightful features that balance addressing our (and our customers) requirements, with end-user expectations. You will primarily be working on our new SimpliCity product, but you may also be asked to help on some other civic customer design work from time-to-time.

We particularly love working with people who are purpose/values-driven, empathetic, genuine, accepting, open-minded, collaborative, communicative, and who like to tackle solving user and business challenges. SimpliCity is woman-led by Founder & CEO Briana Sim; therefore, inclusive and flexible hiring processes and working conditions are important to us. We hope they are important to you too! Our purpose is to support municipalities and other civic organizations to better inform, serve, and engage the public, and we’re eager to see you become as passionate as we are about tackling this challenge.

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As our sole designer (for now), you’ll be responsible for doing all UX and UI web (and at times mobile) design activities and creating all design artifacts. You should possess superior end-to-end design skills. You are able to translate high-level requirements into interaction flows and artifacts, and transform them into seamless, intuitive, and functional user interfaces. Marketing/sales graphic design and branding experience is an added bonus because we’re a new startup and will need help in that area too, but it is not required for this specific posting (we may hire part-time/freelance support for this in future if you don’t also have this particular background).

To be successful in this role, you should be highly skilled with design and collaboration software, and flows, wireframes, and prototyping tools, as well ideally have group (clients and/or users) facilitation and user research experience. You should also strive to understand what staff and public users need to accomplish within our platform and websites. Ideally, you’ll have experience designing web and mobile apps for enterprise-like organizations, with civic orgs related experience being a huge bonus. You are able to provide design solutions for complex problems, accomplish work quickly, and are there for your teammates when they need help.

FYI: this role is focused on designing API-driven, ReactJS web applications/consoles/dashboards/tools that staff members use to do their jobs daily. While designing some websites might be needed to help our municipal customers better serve the public, your primary design tasks will involve working with more complex apps and concepts.

While designing new features and improving existing ones, you’ll be working closely with our founders acting as project manager/product owner (particularly for design iterations and approvals on behalf of our customer) and solutions architect, as well as our software engineers, and a future QA tester.

LOGISTICS

Initially, we are hiring a UX/UI designer for a full-time, 6-month contract to start (either as a contractor or an hourly employee is up to you). However, depending on who applies, we are also open to hiring 2 part-time designers instead of 1 full-time designer.

This position may be extended and/or turned into a full-time permanent role depending on the success of our SimpliCity product in the market, and in your interest in continuing to work with us.

We are open to both full-time (35 hours/week) and part-time (20 hours/week) availability, and you are welcome to work either 4 or 5 days per week. If you are not working from within BC, then we would need the bulk of your daily hours to overlap within our 9am-6pm PST team hours (you can choose which hours within those times work best for you, with some flexibility within the day for other family/home/appointments commitments).

You will be working remotely from within Canada (sorry, candidates physically located outside of Canada will not be considered). Therefore, you will need to provide your own comfortable workspace, equipment, and design environment.

Our budget is within the $40/hour to $60/hour range, depending on if you would like to be paid as an employee, or a self-employed or incorporated contractor, as well as the strength of the experience you bring to the table.

We will be shortlisting candidates quickly from Feb 18 through to Mar 1, with most interviews taking place soon after that. Our target start date is around March 15, 2023 if possible.

Requirements

You’ll do well in this role if you:

• Gather and evaluate user requirements in collaboration with project/product manager and engineers, and then prepare and present rough drafts, including advocating for the whys behind your solutions, to the team and key stakeholders.
• Effectively conceptualize and communicate your ideas and designs, early and iteratively.
• Find creative and effective ways to solve UX and UI challenges.
• Are experienced in creating wireframes (low/med/high fidelity), storyboards, user flows, process flows, and site maps to effectively communicate app ideas, interactions, and designs.
• Design all graphic user interface elements and assets, particularly for addressing various device types, screen sizes, and resolutions.
• Have advanced skills in various design, prototyping, and collaboration software like Figma and Adobe Creative Suite.
• Have tackled interaction design and information architecture.
• Write clear UX copy that shows an understanding and empathy for our target audience.
• Would like to adapt, update/expand, and maintain our design system, especially from within Figma.
• Like to balance creative, blue-sky thinking, by also designing with a modular and systemic approach that encourages thoughtful reuse of design components and paradigms across multiple features.
• Keep the product roadmap and larger design system in mind even when designing more granular interactions.
• Have working knowledge of the Material UI (MUI) design system (our customers tend to default to this style, and our SimpliCity product has started in (and expanded upon) this style but we are open to change that in the future if needed).
• Are comfortable creating and updating design documentation (tracking rules/conventions, terminology, states, guidelines, etc)
• Create, share, and adhere to our product design guidelines, best practices, and standards.
• Research industry trends and competitor and/or peer products.
• Keep up-to-date with the latest design trends, techniques, and technologies.
• Know when and why detailed design deliverables are needed versus when lighter, leaner approaches are warranted.

We also usually look for people who:

• Have 4+ years of full-time UX/UI experience.
• Can share a strong online portfolio showcasing relevant UI and UX design skills, particularly for complex, responsive web applications.
• Possess a degree or post-graduate diploma in design, computer science, business, or related fields,
  – or – a combination of experience and relevant certificates/learning/courses.
• Have worked within agile processes like Scrum or Kanban, Design Sprints, and used tools like JIRA, Slack, or similar.
• Are comfortable working professionally with customers and users in varying industries, especially if you have experience in civic and other public organizations.
• Enjoy facilitating workshops and design sprints (nice-to-have).
• Possess a user-centric and advocacy focus, with an ability to quickly learn and adapt to customers’ and users’ wants, needs, and changing expectations.
• Love designing intuitive and interactive software that users will adore and frequently want to use.
• Are problem-solvers, comfortable with ambiguity and unknowns, and love continuously learning.
• Effectively communicate and collaborate well and often, with excellent verbal and written communication skills.

Bonus points

While none of these are required, do highlight if you have any of the following items as it adds further strength to your application:

• Worked on branding and style guides for new products and/or customers, marketing/sales collateral, and have a graphic design background, then please do share that experience with us. We could use your help in these areas too!
• Skills in HTML/CSS and/or JavaScript.
• Worked with the government, or other civic/education/non-profit organizations before.
• Have used and/or designed for content management systems (CMS). Either traditional ones like Drupal, Wordpress, and Weblow, or extra bonus for headless API-driven ones like Contentful and others like them.

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TIPS FOR GETTING OUR ATTENTION WHEN YOU APPLY

We are a small startup, so currently it’s our CEO Briana Sim who reads every single job application top to bottom. Here are some tips to get her to move you to the top of the pile, so to speak:

• Fill out the “summary” part of our application (or your cover letter) with something a bit more personable, like why this job posting or working with us appeals to you, what transferable skills you have, what your own values are, etc. Highlight any of the bonus items from above that you possess. Basically, write anything that makes you sound like a real person rather than generic words on a page.
• Include a link to your design portfolio (or show your work via an appendix within your resume upload).
• Don’t feel like you have to include only a 1-page resume. If your experience and history warrants a more detailed 2 to 4 page resume, then upload that version instead. We like to read in-depth in your resume and get a feel for your experience, what types of apps you’ve designed for, what skills you used and perfected within those roles, etc.
• Related to the item above, we understand that not everyone has a predictable, steady path in their careers. We like to see your interesting career history and breaks because we think it adds to the holistic view of you as a person.

(If you’ve fully read everything to this point, then feel free to note what a superstar you are in the summary of this application, too! We like to be as forthright and transparent as possible, so that often means these job descriptions are longer than the norm because we’re trying to help you be successful with us. We hope the info we’re providing is useful to you.)

THE OTHER STUFF

This is a remote, work-from-home opportunity. We prefer to hire folks from the west coast in general so we can communicate more in real-time. However, we will also consider other engineers from within all of Canada based on your availability, flexibility to work within enough overlapping Pacific Times, and your skillset.

As this is a specific contract time period to start, we generally hire self-employed or incorporated people who are comfortable with invoicing for their work. However, for those who are not yet set up in this way, and are employees or in transition perhaps looking for a more flexible role, we are also able to put the successful candidate on our payroll as a term-based hourly employee. When applying, please select which situation applies to you (we are equally open to either situation).

Please note that due to our work with Canadian civic customers (and related clients) and their data and privacy restrictions, we can only hire people who currently live in Canada and are authorized to work full-time or part-time in Canada for any employer, This does include people who are in Canada on valid working holiday visas, post-graduate work permits, and other work visas.

Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster. Do not contact us with unsolicited services or offers.