UX Designer - Travelstride

Travelstride is an ambitious Venture-funded Seed stage company led by industry & startup veterans that is serving a large, long-term growing opportunity. Our investors include JetBlue Technology Ventures, NFX (top VC for marketplaces), New York Angels, Sand Hill Angels, and the founders of Trulia, Get There, Hipmunk, TripIt, and Google Now.

We are the top US marketplace for tours, private tailor-made vacations, & adventure trips. Our platform hosts more than 50,000 travel experiences across every continent from ~1,500 of the world’s best travel companies and local experts. With over 125,000 trusted reviews, Travelstride enables travelers of all types to explore the world with ease and confidence. And we are expanding into becoming the most useful and engaged online community for the top 10% of passionate travelers. 

We are a values and mission driven company. Here's what's most important to us:

Our purpose: Bring wonder, joy, learning, and connection through better and more frequent travel.

Our mission: Foster a community connecting travelers with wonderful places, people and experiences.

Our vision: Become the most useful travel community, where people of all types find, share, and book wonderful trips.

Our mantra: Think big. Start Small. Move fast. First do it. Then do it right. Then do it better.

Our core values: Arete, Speed, Grit, Daring, Balance, Growth mindset, Responsibility, Proactive, United, Fun, Resourceful, Trustworthy

As Travelstride’s lead UX Designer, you will work with the founder, product manager and a team of developers to create and improve engaging and satisfying user experiences with new platform features for both travelers and travel companies. As the only full-time designer at this early-stage company, you will be responsible for the complete user experience as well as the look and feel of our products. You will help develop new ideas through research and testing.

You are both a strategic thinker and a tactical doer - eager to roll up your sleeves and do all design work as necessary for both the core product and also to support marketing and other company initiatives

To thrive in this role, you would possess a unique blend of UX, design, business, and technical savvy; a big-picture vision, and the drive to make that vision a reality with a ‘get it done’ attitude.

Does lower base salary, big challenges, bigger impact, talented colleagues, high equity and financial bonus upside, and fun team environment sound good for you? Read on!

On our team, you will:

• Create beautiful web pages and experiences that delight users and achieve business goals

• Design wireframes and pixel perfect hifi designs to meet business needs balancing UX, SEO, CRO and other business goals

• Develop UI mockups and prototypes that clearly illustrate how sites function and look

• Gather and evaluate user requirements in collaboration with product manager and engineers

• Illustrate design ideas using storyboards, process flows and sitemap

• Design graphic user interface elements, like menus, tabs, and widgets

• Identify and troubleshoot UX problems

• Proactively speak with users directly and via surveys and other tools to understand evolving needs and suggest future changes and opportunities

Requirements:

• Have 2 to 5 years of design experience

• Thrive in a fast-paced results-driven environment with varied responsibilities and challenging assignments that would strike fear into the hearts of average designers

• Rock design tools like Figma

• Communicate ideas easily verbally and in writing with engineers and marketing

• Prefer to experiment with new designs and use data to drive decisions rather than view as an art project

• Listen to customers, partners, and teammates, and respond well to feedback

• Embrace Web Usability, User-Centered Design, & Agile methodologies

• Feel passionate that ‘success is in the details as much as in the ‘big picture’

• Love managing multiple projects simultaneously and hit deadlines, using the 80/20 rule as your mantra

• Are known to friends and colleagues as cheerful, with a good sense of humor and a positive attitude

• Enthusiastically and proactively help beyond the bounds of your day to day role

• Ship quickly and adjust your process to fit the needs of an early-stage startup, valuing shipping a good solution now over a great solution several weeks from now.

In a perfect world, you would...

• Have experience in consumer marketplaces, e-commerce or other transaction-oriented consumer web apps preferred

• Know SEO and how to balance it with UX

• Have previously thrived in a true early startup experience previously (from Bootstrap to Series B)

• Understand and have helped design for online niche communities and/or gaming products

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines. Must work in Travelstride’s Austin office (though we are partially remote for time being due to COVID).

Why work with us? The benefits:

• Seed-funded startup comp package with generous stock options and rapid increase potential

• $4,000 annual vacation credits through our travel partners

• Fun, driven, cohesive coworkers and team spirit - Regular company lunches and happy hours plus quarterly team outings & parties

• Meaningful work - you are helping more people travel internationally, and helping our global tour operator partners thrive as sustainable ventures

• The ability to make a major impact as an early team member at a growing startup with huge market size and impressive traction