Mid-level Visual/Interaction Designer
Thanks for your interest in the Mid-level Visual/Interaction Designer position at The Vaan Group!
A little background:
My name is Chuong Nguyen-Thanh, a co-founder of The Vaan Group - a remote-first digital agency, headquartered in Brooklyn, NY, and we’re looking to add a dedicated and experienced senior product designer to our growing team. We believe awesome technology powers the best brands. So we build it. Our technology becomes the foundation upon which businesses scale their operations, escalate their marketing efforts and grow their sales. Most of the time we're building e-commerce engines. Other times we'll be architecting software. Regardless of what we’re making, it's always all digital.
Recent projects we’ve taken on range from designing and building a new admin panel for this innovative e-commerce SaaS company [1], to leading the UX design efforts for this Fortune 500 company [2]’s overhaul of all its e-commerce properties. We’re also a certified Shopify Plus Agency Partner, and so we do a lot of work using the Shopify platform. You can see the full range of client work/portfolio at our website [3]. In addition to our service-based work, we also like to experiment with technology by building our own digital products - everything from e-commerce applications [4] to project management browser extensions.
We’re a realistic group, not necessarily looking for rockstars, ninjas or wizards. Our team resides (or is working from) New York City, Poland, Portugal, The Netherlands, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Norway, Serbia, Algeria, Nigeria, and more. We’re big on team chemistry and we take asynchronous communication pretty seriously because of how critical it is to getting team members across the planet on the same page and pulling in the same direction.
On any given day, you might:
- Kick-off a new e-commerce website design & development project by leading a design requirements and discovery meeting with a client
- Work independently or collaboratively with team members to produce UX deliverables like: a website audit report; information architecture diagrams; wireframes; high-fidelity mockups; interactive prototypes, and design systems
- Produce heuristic and competitive analysis reports for a web project
- Create presentations and documents for clients that provide an overview of art/creative direction for a website redesign
- Play a key role in a design review & feedback gathering session with a client and our project management team
- Work collaboratively with engineers from our team to communicate design specifications and requirements for a web project
- Support a client’s web project launch through things like: performing creative quality assurance and logging feedback tickets using our project/product management software, and coordinating with our project management team to ensure all product requirements have been checked off before going live
The ideal person:
- Understands the demands and expectations of a remote working culture - this one’s especially important to us!
- Is comfortable working collaboratively with product management, project management, engineering, visual/product design, and other stakeholders, in a remote setting
- Is highly motivated, detail-oriented, and capable of thriving in a fast-paced role with limited supervision
- Has excellent organizational, presentation, problem-solving through design and interpersonal skills
- Has experience leading and supporting multiple design projects at the same time
- Has experience leading and supporting e-commerce design projects from concept to launch
- Is comfortable using both quantitative and qualitative data to guide design decisions
- Has experience working with e-commerce, content, and other similar management systems, e.g. Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, etc.
- Is highly proficient using existing design tools, e.g. Sketch, Figma, Framer, etc. and not afraid to learn new technologies
- Has experience creating high-fidelity interactive prototypes for internal and client stakeholder review
- Is a team player and always willing to knowledge-share and contribute to the growth of the team
You bring:
- 4+ years of experience as a user experience designer, interaction designer, web designer, or similar role
- 3+ years of experience designing for mobile, web and web-based devices
- Excellent UX, UI, and interaction design skills
- Fluency in best practices for web-based product design, as well as strong knowledge of usability principles and techniques
- **Bonus - proficiency in front-end programming languages: HTML, CSS, Javascript
Other things you should know:
- This position is currently for independent contractors with opportunity for FT employment
- Freelance rate commensurate with experience
- Initial freelance contract will be for 3-4 months
- FT employee benefits to be discussed pending FT offer
- Although we are accepting applications from candidates located anywhere in the world, this position will require that the candidate is able to accommodate some remote internal team and client-facing meetings in North American time zones.
Please include a link to your portfolio or other samples of work with your application