Head of Design & User Research

About Us:

Sokowatch is transforming communities across Africa by revolutionizing access to essential goods and services. By connecting small merchants to the digital economy, we fix inefficient supply chains and provide services previously unavailable to informal businesses. Sokowatch aims to provide everything a retailer needs, no wholesalers or banks necessary.

Thousands of retailers across Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Uganda use Sokowatch's mobile ordering and delivery platform to receive the goods they need as quickly and cheaply as possible while also accessing growth financing for the first time. We’re looking to grow our team with highly talented and motivated employees who are excited to work in a fast-paced and dynamic startup environment.

Role: Head of Design & User Research, reporting to the Global Head of Product

Sokowatch is seeking an experienced Head of Design & User Research to join our product team in building intuitive user-centric software applications for our retailers and internal users across the supply chain functions while supporting our marketing team with graphic design & branding decisions

Location: Nairobi, Kenya

Duties & Responsibilities:

• Hire, train and lead a team of UI/UX designers and user researchers across East Africa to take Sokowatch’s user research, product planning and agile execution to the next level.
• Develop the vision and charter for design within Sokowatch spanning product & user experience design, branding & graphic design.
• Plan, drive and continuously update an ambitious, pan-East African user research roadmap in alignment with our product OKRs.
• Spearhead the development of Sokowatch’s proprietary design system and create shared repositories for reusable design components.
• Establish standardized user research methods based on human-centred design principles and implement a knowledge base to make all research findings accessible to the team.
• Evangelize the combined use of quantitative and qualitative research approaches and introduce state-of-the-art tools to increase the productivity of user researchers and UI/UX designers.
• Support marketing and branding in all matters related to design including guiding graphic designers and steering third-party agencies.

Requirements:

• University degree in product design, industrial design, human-computer interaction (HCI), or equivalent professional experience
• 2+ years of experience as a design lead, head of design or similar
• 5+ years of experience as a UI/UX designer, interaction designer or similar
• Vast experience in effective research processes (i.e. service design blueprints, persona development, etc.) and experimentation & hypothesis validation (i.e. A/B testing)
• Extensive experience in designing responsive web and mobile applications for first-time smartphone users with poor hardware & connectivity challenges
• Portfolio of work demonstrating breadth and depth of user research skills as well as UX design
• Professional proficiency in visual design and prototyping tools such as Figma, Sketch, Invision, Adobe or equivalent
• Strong team player and ability to make trade-offs in a fast-paced startup environment
• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills with the ability to present a strong rationale for design proposals
• Experience in logistics, the supply chain industry, FMCG or consumer retail is a plus