SPINS is seeking a dynamic UX Designer to join our SPINS design team.

Who we are.

For 20 years, our mission has been to increase the presence and accessibility of natural and organic products to encourage healthier and more vibrant living. By leveraging SPINS’ industry-leading proprietary data and analytics, our technology enables deeper, more engaged relationships between Retailers, Brands and Consumers through our platform, web, and mobile products. At the core of our work lies a passion to create a culture of sustainable health & wellness.

What you will do.

• We help people who make and sell groceries, particularly smaller and independent companies providing natural, specialty and organic foods. These are retailers, manufacturers, distributors and other parts of the food business. SPINS helps them make decisions, using exclusive data on what’s selling in this space.
• Your role is to understand what these people need, identifying new opportunities to provide value that match with what SPINS has exclusive data on natural foods and software to turn that into insights.
• Our design team is on a spectrum from research focused (earlier product design) to production focused (later product design). This role is on the earlier, research side.

More specifically, what it’s like:

• In your first month, you will meet your colleagues on the design, engineering and product teams, who will help you onboard and settle in.
• In your first month, you’ll tour the SPINS data catalog and the work that goes into turning the bleep sound at cash register in Albany into meaningful insights into food trends.
• In your first three months, you will have talked to dozens of users and potential users, using research techniques that you chose to surface insights into their work.
• In your first three months, you’ll have built a low fidelity prototype of a potential solution and tested that with users.
• In your first three months, you’ll have condensed these results into actionable takeaways and delivered that to a product team to execute on.
• In your first three months, you’ll collaborate with designers on product teams, guiding them on research techniques to confirm assumptions and evaluate what we’ve built.

What you bring.

• You organize your design work around the people we serve. Curiosity towards people, businesses, and technical systems inform this. Your skill with visual and interaction design helps you execute. But human outcomes are how we decide if a design is “good”.
• You have studied UX design. This might be in school or on the job, but either way you are current on product design theory and practice. You have a vocabulary of design concepts and at some point, put daily practice to UX, interaction and visual design.
• You have some experience supporting software teams with design insight and direction. You are familiar with ticketing systems, iteration cycles, and product roadmaps.
• You might have worked on a team that brought a product to market, you might have worked in a Lean product development methodology. If not, you’ve read the books.
• You have worked on data visualization. You might have some experience with the difficulty of presenting numbers in a messy, analog world.
• You have some intuition about what fidelity will communicate your ideas: sometimes a whiteboard sketch is all you need, sometimes an interactive click prototype, sometimes a high-fidelity visual mockup.
• You have the design skills to execute your ideas in a variety of tools. We are tool agnostic but have used paper, Sketch, Adobe XD, or browser prototypes.
• You care about responsive design and accessible design, because software is used by people, and some people use screen readers or work on loading docks.
• You understand how browsers create experiences (you might know some CSS), and how web applications work (you might know a little JavaScript or a little SQL, but more importantly, you have a good understanding about what Web applications are good or bad at doing).
• You have a willingness to travel up to 50% to conduct field research (ethnographic research) with customers.

The SPINS Way

• Direct – We communicate with clarity, honesty and respect in all situations and embrace opportunities to provide solution-oriented feedback.
• Determined – We are committed to overcoming all obstacles to achieve results. We adapt to change, seek opportunities to learn and rapidly translate that learning into action.
• Passionate – We go above and beyond to help our partners achieve their goals. We challenge assumptions and are comfortable forging new paths.
• Collaborative – We leave our egos at the door, believing that working together we will produce an outcome that’s greater than each individual contribution.

Why SPINS?

• Health, dental and vision insurance
• 401k (Traditional and Roth) plus company match
• FSA for medical and dependent care expenses
• Pre-tax commuter benefit
• Life insurance
• Short- and long-term disability
• Paid maternity and paternity leave
• Bike storage
• Fresh and healthy snacks
• Vibrancy 360 Wellness Program: Yoga and fitness classes, onsite massage, volunteer opportunities, company happy hours, product demos, outings, and more