Website UX/UI Designers and Partners (solo and/or agencies) – government focus

Job title: Website UX/UI Designers and Partners (solo and/or agencies) – government focus

Job description: Hiya! We’re , 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 SaaS website and integration 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

As we aim to expand SimpliCity across Canada in 2024 and beyond, we know that we can’t take on all the website design work ourselves (particularly because we are staying focused on designing and building new product features). Therefore, we’re on the lookout for skilled (Senior) Website UX/UI Designers and Partners with experience and strong portfolios in client facilitation, design sprints, user research, and UX/UI design for enterprise, government, education, and non-profit websites. You will primarily be working on designing municipal and other public sector websites that will be built and hosted on our SimpliCity CMS platform, but you may also be asked to help on some other public sector 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 ; therefore, inclusive and flexible hiring & partnering processes, and working conditions are important to us. We hope they are important to you too! Our purpose is to support municipalities and other public sector 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.

LOGISTICS

We’re essentially looking to partner up with solo designers and/or agencies on various public sector RFPs and resulting implementation projects, along with our own pilot projects with municipalities when they request website design services as part of that work. We’d like to put together a strong roster of qualified designers/agencies who we can collaborate with in order to ensure winning bids and project success. We will always give you the option to opt in or opt out of opportunities, and to adjust budgets and scope depending on each project.

We’re open to independent contractor/consulting agreements, or we can also work with folks who prefer to be paid as employees under limited-term/hourly employee agreements.

Alternately, if you’re a larger agency with extensive public sector website experience and RFP wins, we are open to being a sub to your submissions, and solely act as the CMS platform (and implementation developers if/where applicable).

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

Our website design budgets are typically in the $40/hr to $70/hr range depending on skills and experience levels, and projects may be hourly or fixed-price depending on the opportunity. Please share your expectations and rates in this area to ensure budgetary alignment.

Our first round of shortlisting partners will occur from Fri Feb 23 to Fri Mar 8, 2024, with interviews taking place within the week or two after that (or earlier if more urgent opportunities come up during that time).

We may do rolling shortlisting and interview rounds, and we may keep this posting up for an extended period of time in order to ensure our qualified design partner list is robust enough to meet our current and future growth needs.

Requirements

You’ll do well in this role if you:

• Are comfortable working professionally with customers and users in larger organizations, especially if you have experience in government and other public sector organizations.
• Enjoy, and are skilled at, facilitating workshops, user research sessions, and design sprints with customers and/or their users.
• 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 customer stakeholders.
• Effectively conceptualize and communicate your ideas and designs, early and iteratively.
• Find creative and effective ways to solve UX and UI challenges.
• Are knowledgeable in, and have proven experience in, designing for common (and emerging) accessibility standards across Canada.
• Identity, website, and marketing/sales graphic design and branding experience
• Are experienced in creating wireframes (low/med/high fidelity), storyboards, user flows, process flows, and site maps to effectively communicate 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.
• Are highly skilled in interaction design and information architecture.
• Can create and update/expand customer website design systems, especially from within Figma and customer-facing tools like zeroheight, etc
• 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.
• 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).
• Know when and why detailed design deliverables are needed versus when lighter, leaner approaches are warranted.

We also usually look for people who:

• Are at a senior (or higher) level in your career, and can share a strong online portfolio/case studies (and eventually client references) showcasing relevant UI and UX website design skills, particularly for complex, responsive, and accessible websites for government (municipal/provincial/federal), education, and other public sector organizations.
• Have worked within agile processes like Scrum or Kanban, Design Sprints, and used tools like JIRA, Slack, or similar.
• Research industry trends and competitor and/or peer products.
• Keep up-to-date with the latest design trends, techniques, and technologies.
• Write clear UX copy that shows an understanding and empathy for our target audience.
• Possess a user-centric and advocacy focus, with an ability to quickly learn and adapt to customers’ and users’ wants, needs, and changing expectations.
• 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.
• You are able to provide design solutions for complex problems, accomplish work quickly, and are there for your teammates when they need help.
• You (or members on your team) 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.

Bonus points

While these are not necessarily required, please do highlight if you have any of the following items as it adds further strength to your application:

• Service and process design skills/experience.
• Skills in HTML/CSS and/or JavaScript.
• Have used and/or designed for headless API-driven content management systems (CMS), like Contentful and others like them.

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TIPS FOR GETTING OUR ATTENTION WHEN YOU APPLY

SimpliCity is a small startup spun off from Radical, so currently it’s our CEO Briana Sim who reads every single response 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, the strength of your experience, and highlight any of the bonus items from above that you possess. Basically, write anything that makes you sound like a real person!
• Include a link to your design portfolio and/or case studies (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 resume, then upload that version instead. We like to read your resume in-depth and get a feel for your experience, what types of websites you’ve designed and for who, what skills you used and perfected, etc.

(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

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.

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