Product Designer

About Kandua

Kandua is part of Plus Ecosystem Ventures, a wholly owned, independent subsidiary of Santam. That means we are a tech startup, with corporate muscle.

Kandua helps small home service businesses grow. We connect them to customers and we take the sweat out of business management with easy-to-use tech tools. Our mission is to use tech to shorten the distance between having a skill and making a living from it: helping the people who help us every day.

Kandua.com is South Africa’s #1 online marketplace for home services. Every month, over 40 000 rated home service pros have access to around R50 million worth of work opportunities from individual customers, and access to business customers through Kandua’s partnership with Santam.. The Kandua for Pros app puts a head office in the palm of every pro’s hand: send professional quotes and invoices, accept card and online payments, keep track of customer communication, and get visibility of business performance, all from a mobile phone, and all safely stored in the cloud.

Job Summary

Are you passionate about designing and shipping impactful experiences? We are looking for a full-time, mid-level product designer with strong research and visual design skills to join our expanding team. In this role,  you  will work closely with the Product Manager in discovery work to conduct user research and deeply understand the pain points of our customers. We expect our product designers to ensure that our user experience is word-class. As such, you  will help to define unique solutions which are better than the current solutions our potential customers use to solve their problems. Your primary responsibility will be to ensure that our product is intuitive and easy to use. You will update existing user flows to optimize our current product and create new ones as we build out further features and entirely new products.

Our Product Designers are responsible for CX, UX and UI work. We regularly build wireframes and prototypes to quickly test with customers and iterate until we know that what we are building is easily usable by our customers. After this, you will finalize the User Interface design so that it is ready for developers to use to deliver the product.

We expect you to collaborate with other Product Designers to provide each other feedback and build our structural work such as our design system and user interview library. As part of this exciting venture, you will work on challenging, thought-provoking work daily. You will work with a team of like-minded, driven individuals.

Key Responsibilities

As a Product Designer, you will have the following responsibilities:

• Understand the business problem space and use data and insights to design customer-centric solutions.

• Run customer research to deeply understand their pain points 

• Quickly build wireframes and prototypes to test with customers and iterate until we believe it is highly usable

• Explore many potential solutions to given problems while quickly judging the best potential solutions yet not getting fixated on the first idea

• Design and optimise applications to maximise usability 

• Build the final UI designs and work closely with the engineering team to ensure quality. (We primarily prototype in Figma)

• Define interaction models, user task flows, and UI specifications

• Work with the interdisciplinary product team to incorporate a visual or brand identity into the finished product 

• Do whatever needs to get done to support Kandua as we strive to grow

• Design and produce marketing materials, including digital and print assets, that align with the brand’s visual identity and messaging.

Qualifications and Skills

• 5+ years relevant industry experience

• Experience working across all product stages from discovery to delivery.

• Proven knowledge with a broad range of tools or technologies for example Figma, Sketch, InVision, Principle, Framer or similar prototyping tools

• Deep understanding of both Apple’s and Google’s design guidelines 

• Strong experience in translating user research and usability test findings into iterative product solutions

• Ability to work closely with an interdisciplinary team to solve hard problems 

• Continued education and research into UX trends and current design strategy and technologies

The big pluses will be:

• University degree in Interaction Design, Interface Design, Human Computer Interaction, Service Design, Design Planning, Strategy, Information Systems, Arts or other relevant degree

• Knowledge of AI tools and how to use them to augment the design process.

• Experience in product, brand strategy and design.

• Experience in mobile-first design.

• Knowledge of HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Skills:

• Ability to problem solve and ‘think-out-of-the-box’ 

• High drive/self-starter/proactive and anticipate requirements 

• Excellent attention to detail

• Strong judgment, prioritisation, and planning skills

• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills across all levels

• Highly professional

Competencies:

• Owner Mindset

• Gets things done

• Empathy

• Collaboration 

• Customer focus 

• Flexibility and adaptability