Shelter is looking for a User Experience professional with an in-depth understanding of Lean and Agile methodologies, in particular how they relate to UX, to join us as Lead UX Designer and head up our expanding UX team.
Shelter helps millions of people every year struggling with bad housing or homelessness through our advice, support and legal services. And we campaign to make sure that, one day, no one will have to turn to us for help. We’re here so no one has to fight bad housing or homelessness on their own.
It’s an exciting time to join our growing and evolving cross-functional digital team that spans front and back end development, UX/UI, content production, social media, analytics and more. We already do some brilliant service design work that affects our digital offering, our helpline and our centres around the country. We also build digital tools to campaign for change and fundraise to keep Shelter running. And, with a new leadership team working on a fresh organisational strategy, we’ve recently received additional investment to expand our capacity to meet the challenges ahead. Challenges that you could soon play a big part in tackling.
About the role
As our lead UX specialist, we’ll rely on you to provide the user experience perspective and develop a vision of best practice to optimise our user journeys, services, products and campaigns to meet user need. You’ll also manage a team consisting of a UI designer, service designer and user researcher. Conducting user research will be important too, as will running workshops, prototyping, optimising user journeys, developing metrics and benchmarks – and whatever else it takes to design solutions that meet users needs. In short, you’ll champion UX across the organisation, feed insight into our product roadmaps, our designs and our sprints and work with subject matter experts and in-house creatives along the way.
About you
You’ll need a track record in leading user-centred design processes, including user research, prototyping, implementation and optimisation and usability testing techniques. You’ll also need to have led UX aspects of agile development projects and worked on interface and interaction design across a range of digital products and services. Solving IA and navigation challenges for large and complex websites and applications also comes naturally to you. What’s more, you’re proficient using modern design and prototyping tools (currently we’re using Sketch and Marvel, alongside pen, paper, post-its and whiteboards but, as you know, tools change all the time) and used to liaising with web developers to translate design into implementation. Literacy in HTML5, CSS and JavaScript and/or experience of designing for service delivery, while useful, is not essential.
Benefits include 30 days’ annual leave, the possibility of flexible working, enhanced family friendly policies and significant opportunities for learning and development.
Shelter is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of clients, in particular children, young people and vulnerable adults, and expects all staff, workers and volunteers to share this commitment.
At Shelter, we welcome and encourage applications from everyone regardless of age, disability, gender, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation. We are facing diverse problems, so need diverse people to tackle them.
Shelter does not accept unsolicited CVs from external recruitment agencies nor accept the fees associated with them.