Would you like to join a world class User Experience team that is fanatically dedicated to solving complex design challenges? Do you want to be a part of a team that can get your beautiful, awesome designs built and launched into production in as little as 24 hours? Do you have a passion for the hospitality and service industry, and a desire to construct a more pleasant experience for all actors involved? If you answered yes to these questions, it sounds like you could be a Toaster!

Toast is a rapidly growing startup building the first all-in-one restaurant management software platform. Toast’s Android tablet based system helps restaurants operate more efficiently and connect with their customer base in new and innovative ways. We’re growing fast and have a customer base comprised of cafes, restaurants, bars and nightclubs across the country. We are passionately interested in how our users interface with our products and platform. We strive to bring the best designs and interfaces to our users through learning about their behaviors in different environments and how their attitudes and preferences affects how they interact with our product.

The User Experience Designer is accountable for conducting in-depth user research and driving the development of innovative app designs on web, mobile, and a variety of other hardware devices from conceptualization to implementation. You will also be responsible for optimizing existing user interfaces for better user productivity, discoverability, and simplicity.

You will collaboratively partner with Product Management, Customer Success, Marketing, Sales, Business Development, and Documentation to establish a forward-looking, user experience that touches upon every aspect of the user or customer journey. Additionally, you will be expected to leverage and help evolve Toast’s interactive design language in an engaging and creative way, while considering specific user needs, as you ideate or evaluate initial concepts. You should be able to apply and convey a solid rationale as part of this creative process, maintaining a keen awareness and understanding of user needs, as well as Toast’s business goals. In your designs, you must thoughtfully consider the rich microinteractions of UI components, touchpoints, and workflows to help users achieve their goals, while also making sure it is consistent and compatible with all other Toast user interfaces.

• Support the user experience strategy and vision set by the Director of User Experience
• Convert research insights into rich UX solutions for web and Android hardware devices that impress, engage, and empower users within the restaurant industry.
• Be a storyteller – a critical element of all our roles on the UX team is to deliver insights about people and behavior, both verbally and visually, in a way that generates empathy, emotion, and engagement from stakeholders and customers.
• Consistently apply the established Toast brand's look and feel across all application designs
• Provide expert advice and analysis on key user interface issues that arise in existing products and systems
• Evaluate and propose hardware designs for mobile devices that optimize ergonomics and usability in all relevant restaurant contexts
• Participate in both small- and large-scale ethnographic field studies in order to discover and deeply understand restaurant-based workflows, challenges, and overall user/customer culture.
• Leverage user empathy techniques, including contextual inquiry, shadowing, task analysis, participatory design, and diary studies, in order to directly capture user desires, perceptions, expectations, temporal rhythms, key interactions, and pain points.
• Help create user personas based on discovery research activities out in the field.
• Leverage other engaging visual deliverables, such as journey maps and task matrices, to educate stakeholders, effectively communicate usability findings, suggest recommendations, and develop an evidence-based rationale for design.
• Participate in cross-functional, collaborative “design studio” sessions to brainstorm, ideate, and sketch out innovative new product concepts. Assimilate winning ideas, while maintaining overarching UX vision.
• Produce sketches and wireframe mockups based on defined business requirements, translating product strategy into design concepts that meet user goals, brand standards, and business objectives.
• Enable prototypes to be used for internal review, usability testing, and customer demos.
• Coordinate and moderate usability tests, both in person and remotely, in order to validate designs
• Continuously track and report on UX-related success metrics, using web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, Amplitude, or Mixpanel.
• Work closely with development teams throughout scrum sprints to ensure that user interfaces are implemented in full adherence with the prototypes and design specifications

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 2+ years’ experience as an interaction designer, or related occupation, producing exceptional end-to-end user experiences for B2B and B2C mobile and rich web applications
• Bachelor’s or equivalent degree, concentrating in human-computer interaction, behavioral cognitive science, new media design, or a related design field, such as architecture.
• Understand and apply user-centered design processes and methodologies
• Experience conducting upfront, qualitative user research, as well as moderated and unmoderated usability testing.
• Expertise in information architecture and interaction design
• Deep understanding of user heuristics, design principles, and best practices.
• Capable of translating system complexity into simple, easily consumable design concepts that fit in with the way a user or customer thinks
• Ability to create instant tangibility through storytelling and rapid prototyping methods, ranging from paper sketching to digital, high-fidelity prototyping
• Proficiency with Axure, JustInMind, Sketch, Invision, and/or similar prototyping software tools
• Some familiarity with visual design concepts such as page layout considerations, prioritization of information, usage of color palettes, proximity, contrast, and font usage
• Familiarity with current web based technologies and frameworks (e.g. HTML5, CSS, Bootstrap, Angular), as well as the Android mobile platform in order to predict their impact on the feasibility of design solutions.
• Some hospitality and service industry domain knowledge is an advantage, but certainly not required