Reports To: The UX/Front-end Designer will report to the Chief Product Officer

Company Overview: Excelerate America (EA) is a network for small business entrepreneurs to transform their businesses from small to mighty. Collaborating with a diverse set of partners and communities, EA brings together a community wanting to help each other thrive; through inspiration, problem-solving and access to curated products and services. The next phase of EA’s growth is to develop a dynamic and engaging mobile community platform driven by peer-to-peer problem-solving. This platform will help EA scale and connect its existing communities to power-up entrepreneurs' abilities to work together, get guidance from peers, and have a greater impact in their local communities.  

Job Overview: The UX/Front-end Designer works as a leading member of EA’s growing software and product technology team to help design, develop, and launch EA’s platform.

As a critical member of the product team, the UX Designer will work closely with the founding leadership and product development team to design, test and launch our new community problem solving platform. We believe in a human-centered approach to design and the UX Designer will be critical to infusing this into our products and culture.  With that, you will help lead efforts to identify needs of users, define critical journeys and design wireframes and final assets for prototypes and products. You will work closely with the Chief Product Officer and lead engineers to build a platform that is engaging, fun and able to scale quickly.  

Excelerate America is a Detroit-based organization. We believe in a flexible work environment with 3 days in-office, 2 days remote approach to allow for cross-disciplinary collaboration. The UX/Front-end Designer role is preferred to be co-located in Detroit with the product team.  Remote will be considered.  

Responsibilities and Duties:

• Work closely with the Chief Product Officer to create critical user journey’s, wireframes, and design assets for the platform
• Build a cohesive end-to-end experience for EA’s existing channels with a cross-functional team of designers, marketers, business partners, and engineers. 
• In close collaboration with software engineers, design, develop and iterate on EA’s platform providing well organized and structured assets and communication
• Improve user engagement and create a product platform that is fun, interactive, and infuses best practices of behavior science, gaming, and online networking. 
• Bonus: Develop front experiences for mobile, responsive web to be leveraged for the core features of the community platform

Qualifications:

• Masters in Design/Computer Science or equivalent learning/experience
• 4+ years of experience in product design and launching consumer experiences working closely with developers (or developing yourself)
• Strong visual design skills that encapsulate the latest modern UI trends and aesthetics. 
• Experience in designing community platforms and engagement starting from a grassroots, bottom-up approach into a scaled and active experience
• Launched and maintained a consumer mobile experience with a focus on daily engagement on a responsive web platform
• Competency in UX best practices and tools including but not limited to Figma, Sketch, Photoshop, InVision, and/or UX animation tools
• Creative mindset and willingness to prototype quickly to learn and adjust
• Passion for helping end-users, particularly small business owners, and doing whatever it takes to make their experience truly helpful
• Experience in agile, sprint-based development approach leveraging tools like Trello, Google Docs, Chat, etc to collaborate closely with a multidisciplinary team
• Bonus: Front-end dev experience including but not exclusive to React, javascript, and other HTML/CSS frameworks
• Bonus: Ability to design and product UI animations for mobile web using the latest tools such as After Effects, Haiku, or Flow