Associate Service Designer

About us

Local Welcome makes it fun and easy for people to cook and eat with refugees in their community.

We’re looking for a brilliant new Associate Service Designer to help us build diverse, resilient and powerful communities, acting together for their common good. Local Welcome was started in 2015, by British and Syrian community leaders as a response to the Syrian refugee crisis. Our current focus is learning to scale our impact by building new partnerships, particularly with Ukrainian community leaders across the UK. Our primary service brings together refugees and local residents to cook and eat shared meals, while answering simple questions, such as, “What was your favourite childhood meal?”

You’ll be joining a young charity determined to keep growing and increasing our impact. 

Role profile

You will be part of the product team as Local Welcome’s associate service designer. You will be involved in user research, mapping end-to-end user journeys, and prototyping iterations of our physical and digital infrastructure. Additionally, you will be responsible for Local Welcome’s visual identity, the design of graphic assets, and the visual elements of our user experience. This will involve a varied workload, ranging from one-off assets for our website, or social media channels, to larger projects such as laying out annual reports. 

Responsibilities

1. Lead on the UX and graphic communication of our service, within our multidisciplinary team
2. Deliver design workshops with the whole team, to help us generate new iterations our services
3. Build prototypes to reflect new hypotheses, then collect and analyse data from usability tests to feed back into the design cycle
4. Create and maintain graphic assets for our website, social media, and printed resources, and be the brand guardian for Local Welcome’s visual identity
5. Contribute to user research, and bring a design perspective to our roadmaps, OKRs, and weekly delivery cycles
6. Support the delivery of meals and operation of our service in other ways as needed from time to time in a small, agile, remote team

Experience and skills

You’ll have UX design experience, including wireframing, prototyping and service mapping. You will be able to demonstrate how you have used these skills to contribute to the success of a product or service. 

It’s important that you have design research skills including interviewing and usability testing. We’ll want to hear about examples of how they have improved your work. 

You will have a basic awareness of how to prototype in code. You should be able to use tools, change text, and make use of other platforms for mock-up purposes. You will also be able to edit existing code and ‘re-use’ it.

We need someone with solid graphic design skills, so you’ll need to show us examples of your work. We’re more interested in you understanding the foundations of typography, colour and layout, than producing glossy graphics. Check out our website and social media feeds for the level of design we’re looking for.

Local Welcome’s website is hosted by Squarespace and we use Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for advertising and marketing, so you’ll have experience of publishing to these platforms, or similar. 

Values

Our values are not just a set of nice words we stick up on the wall in our office, they are very important to us and we gently hold ourselves and each other accountable to them every day. We expect everyone on our team to embody our values:

• Build open, honest and diverse relationships
• Deliver joy through service
• Think big and act long-term
• Be creative and take risks
• Grow and learn
• Have compassion and fun
• Build diverse supportive teams
• Eat together
• Tell the truth
• Be humble

We value inclusivity

Inclusivity is really important and we are actively seeking to make our team both more diverse, and more reflective of the experiences and perspectives of people in the communities we work with. We are currently keen to receive applications from anyone with Ukrainian heritage, anyone with experience of forced migration, and anyone resident in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.

Employment terms

Like some of our other team members, you will be a day-rate freelancer, with a written agreement rather than an employment contract. This means holiday and sick leave are unpaid, and you will be responsible for managing your personal taxes. We also ask that you have a reliable laptop and smartphone to use for work purposes. Please let us know if you would like to see our freelancer policy for more details.

Got questions? Interested?

Please send a CV and a cover letter outlining why you’d be a good fit for this role to [email removed - click apply for more details]by Friday 16 September 9am. Please include the role title in the subject line of the email.

You’ll find the full role description, an information pack and advice on how to apply on our website at www.localwelcome.org/recruitment