Request for Quote — Remote UX/UI Designer

tl;dr

We want to establish a relationship with a senior, on-demand, freelance, remote UX/UI designer. We’re looking for someone who can help us refine and develop our existing, operational transactional product (with app+web+mail touchpoints) by adhering to, formalizing, and extending, our existing design system; keeping a constant, constructive dialog with adjacent functions within our team; and help us constantly improve our User Experience.

About Woonivers

Woonivers is a 100% digital Tax Free Operator. In collaboration with our associated stores, we help international travelers who purchase goods outside their home tax zones to refund their sales taxes (VAT in the European Union) according to local regulations. Travelers who buy in our associated stores only have to install our app, authenticate themselves with a passport photo and a selfie, and scan their sales receipt. We generate an in-app digital tax refund application that can be electronically stamped in the port or airport in the day of departure. Once the traveler is back in their country of residence, we reimburse them their sales tax (minus official transaction fees) using a variety of payment methods. Our approach is unique in that it fully and strictly complies with current local regulations, while keeping operational involvement of associated stores to a minimum (in normal situations, associated stores don’t need to use any software or train their staff in any way).

Our solution is fully operational in Spain, with a constant growth in number of new stores recruited as well as transactions fully completed (until the COVID-19 lockdown). Currently we are planning to go live in other countries.

Our main contact points with travelers and retailers are:

• Our website (www.woonivers.com)
• Our app (available in App Store and Google Play)
• A variety of rich format e-mail communications
• Our simple web application for store owners

We’re a semi-distributed team with some team members working co-located, and others working remotely.

User Centered Design culture in Woonivers

In Woonivers we work with a strong User Centered Design culture. We run Customer Success studies weekly, constantly identify bottlenecks in our transaction lifecycle funnels, build hypotheses about behavioral issues, and test/implement possible solutions. We also periodically run qualitative studies to better understand the needs and expectations of travelers and retailers.

Based on behavioral insights gathered in our initial studies, we are currently running the second generation of our app. Contrary to most digital tax free operators who use an interaction model based on the lifecycle of the tax refund process from the point of view of documents, our current interaction model is based on the traveler’s mental model of the tax refund process. This alleviates the mental load of travelers and helps us achieve very good usability metrics. We do not plan to make drastic changes in this interaction model in the next few months.

What we need

We are currently in a product development phase in which, for the upcoming months, we will need incremental developments and improvements on our different digital touchpoints, building on the existing interaction model / design system. All of these developments and improvements will need UX and UI work.

We’re looking for an experienced, part-time, on-demand, freelance UX/UI designer who can:

• Assimilate all the formal and informal knowledge we already have on our different users and their needs and expectations, as well as our interaction model and design system for each of our touchpoints.
• Keep a constant dialog with the Product Owner, the Customer Success responsible, the Head of Engineering, and the Head of Marketing, to understand our UX/UI needs and contribute with a UX perspective to discussions on new developments.
• Specify the User Experience Design of new developments in mutually agreed formats that can serve as discussion materials with the Product team and lean functional specifications for the Engineering team.
• Provide high-quality digital assets to build the User Interface elements of new developments, and improve the existing ones, in the formats requested by the Engineering team.
• Proactively suggest improvements to our User Experience and formulate hypotheses that can be validated or refuted with our existing sources of knowledge (primarily application metrics plus some occasional qualitative inquiries).
• Work is on an on-demand basis. We estimate this might need a discontinuous dedication pattern, with an initial dedication of approximately 10–15 full-time days on the moment of closing the agreement to get up to speed, plus a maintenance dedication of approximately 4–6 days per month, punctuated by bursts of 5 full-time days whenever we launch important updates. An accumulated dedication of 10 to 15 full-time person-weeks during the rest of the current year is our current ballpark estimation of the total dedication we will need. As we understand you will juggle this contract with other gigs, we expect some flexibillity will be expected and given from both parties.

How to apply

To be considered for this RFQ, please provide:

• A CV and portfolio that proves your experience in complex transactional interfaces, as well as your ability to adhere to and extend existing design systems / interaction models.
• A motivation letter that tells us how you find our business interesting and what you believe you can contribute.
• Your desired hourly rate for the type and magnitude of engagement we estimate.

Please send your applications to cesar@woonivers.com.