Please note: this role has been filled and is no longer available.

Thank you for your interest in this position. Unfortunately, it's no longer available. We've left the original job posting here for reference, to give you an idea of the kinds of things we're working on. Please see our jobs page for up-to-date information on any positions that are currently available, and what benefits we offer.

UX designer, full time, London

Salary range: £40,000—£50,000 per year

Hackworth are hiring a full time user experience (UX) designer in London, United Kingdom. This is an on-site role. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, you'll be working from home somewhere in the UK until it's safe to return to a shared office space.

In this role, you'll help design and evaluate our first product: a novel, interactive learning environment for programming, rooted in functional programming principles, with a particular focus on the visualization of program execution. You'll join our existing team, which consists of 3 software developers.

As the lead of our UX effort, your role will include:

• exploring and consolidating ideas from the human-computer interaction (HCI) and Learning Sciences literature;
• participating in the design of our prototypes and products, having full responsibility for user experience;
• evaluating the usability and efficiency of our prototypes and products; and
• communicating your results and recommendations to your colleagues, and to the greater HCI community in the form of submissions to conferences and journals, if you so choose.

You'll also be responsible for designing, organizing, and running user studies and design workshops with students and teachers during the development process, following a participatory design approach.

The ultimate purpose of this role is to support the creation of a great programming environment for kids, with measurable benefits for learning, and meaningful integration of teachers' expertise.

About us

Hackworth Ltd is a well-financed, bootstrapped, private limited company based in London, United Kingdom. Our purpose is to make programming relevant to children of all backgrounds. Our first step toward that goal is to develop programming languages and tools designed for learning about computation.

We're committed to building a sustainable, ethical, socially responsible business. We serve children and schools; therefore, we'll never fund our business by selling ad placements, or by exploiting compulsion loops via loot boxes or micro-transactions. We want to build products that have genuine value to our users. See our about page for our commitment.

Your qualifications

To apply for this role, you should meet the following requirements:

1. A master's degree in human-computer interaction (HCI). If you didn't graduate in HCI, a degree in a related field (computer science, psychology, etc.) or equivalent practical experience is expected.
2. Experience with quantitative and qualitative methods of research design. This includes usability studies, in-depth interviews, user testing, surveys, and statistical analysis. Field experience with actual users is very desirable. Experience with co-design or participatory design is a plus.
3. Knowledge of programming languages. You'll not be expected to write any code for us, but an understanding of programming is obviously very valuable, given the context. In particular, knowledge of, or experience with, functional programming is a plus.
4. You can be on-site at our London office at least 4 days per week, once it's safe to return to a shared office space. Our standard remote working policy requires that you be on-site most days, though this policy is currently indefinitely suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Until it's safe to return to a shared office space, you can work remotely from anywhere within the UK. For details on our current COVID-19 remote working policy, and the conditions under which we'd consider a return to our standard remote working policy, please see here.
5. You're eligible to work in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, we're not able to offer visas to work in the UK at this time. If you're an EU/EEA/Swiss citizen and you're concerned about Brexit, please see here.

It will help your application if you can present a portfolio of the different projects and/or academic publications you've contributed to. In particular, it's important for us to understand the intention of these projects and your contributions to them. We recognize and acknowledge that not everybody has or is able to disclose a complete portfolio of their previous work. If you're unable to present a portfolio, please include instead a list of the methods and approaches you've used in previous projects.

If you have experience in any of the following topics or areas, that's a definite plus, and you should mention it in your application, but please note that these are not required for the role:

• Teaching, or working with teachers, schools, or students
• Learning Sciences research
• Education research, especially computing education research (CER)
• Assistive technologies (screen readers, ARIA, etc.)
• Game design
• Block-based programming (e.g., Scratch)

Finally, please take a moment to review our frequently-asked questions about working at Hackworth, to make sure you're compatible with our environment, our policies, and our culture.

Benefits

We offer the following benefits:

• 25 paid holidays per year, in addition to public holidays in England and Wales.
• We match pension contributions up to 10% of your qualifying earnings.
• A generous parental leave policy.
• A flexible working policy, giving employees the option of working a 4-day week with either compressed hours, or reduced hours at proportionally reduced compensation.
• Flexible hours, within reason.
• Bike and TfL Travelcard loan options.
• A liberal, explicit personal projects policy.
• We encourage employees to contribute to open source projects, and we're committed to open-sourcing as many of our own projects as is feasible.

Applying

To apply for this role, please submit a CV to [email protected]. (Please note: this role has been filled and is no longer available.) Even if you're unsure about your fit, or if you have any additional questions about the role, or about working at Hackworth in general, please get in touch! We'd rather hear from you than not.

Hackworth are committed to diversity. We are an equal opportunities employer and do not discriminate on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, marital or civil partner status, pregnancy or maternity, gender reassignment, race, color, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, disability or age.