Middleweight UX Designer

This is a contract role with a Manchester digital agency that designs and builds products for ecommerce and retail clients. They sit in the space between brand and product: interfaces that have to convert, still feel human, and survive contact with real catalogues, promotions, and messy operational reality. The team is collaborative, product-minded, and allergic to design that only looks good in a deck.

The project is a redesign of an ecommerce platform for a retail client that has outgrown its current experience. The site works, just about, but it is slow to navigate, inconsistent across categories, and painful on mobile. Conversion has flattened. Support tickets keep pointing at the same friction. The agency has been brought in to rethink the core customer journeys: browse, search, product detail, basket and checkout, plus the account moments that sit around them. Discovery is underway. They need a middleweight UX designer who can turn research and direction into clear flows, wireframes and prototypes the wider team can build from.

Day to day you will map journeys, pressure-test edge cases, and design flows that hold up when the catalogue is imperfect and the user is in a hurry. You will build wireframes and interactive prototypes in Figma, run and synthesise feedback with the design lead, and sit with developers early enough that the design does not fall apart in build. You will help define component behaviour, empty states, error handling and the unglamorous details that separate a redesign that ships from one that stalls. Some days are workshop days. Some days are deep focus in the file. Both count.

You will report into the design lead on the account and work alongside a UI designer, a researcher (part-time on this brief), and a frontend team who expect designs they can actually implement. Client workshops are part of the rhythm. You will present work, explain decisions without jargon, and take commercial constraints seriously. The creative director stays close on brand expression; your job is to make the experience work.

The agency is hybrid, with a strong preference for time in the Manchester studio during key workshop and critique weeks. Two to three days on site is typical once the project is moving. Remote days are focused delivery days. The culture is straightforward and kind. People say what they mean, show the work, and improve it together. No heroics required. Reliability and clarity go further here than performance.

This is a good job if you want to shape a live ecommerce redesign end to end, not just decorate screens. You will see your flows survive contact with developers, stakeholders and real shoppers. Manchester studio, proper rate, a team that values UX as a craft, and a brief with a clear commercial reason to exist.

Essential: roughly three to five years in UX or product design, with middleweight ownership of substantial workstreams. Agency or product-team experience both welcome if the craft is there.

Portfolio: show end-to-end UX thinking, not only polished UI. We want to see problem framing, user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and how feedback changed the work. Include at least one ecommerce, retail, or transactional product example. If you can talk about conversion, accessibility, or mobile constraints with specifics, even better. Case studies beat moodboards.

Tools: strong in Figma, including components, variants and prototyping. Comfortable with FigJam or equivalent for workshops and journey mapping. Familiarity with user-testing tools and basic analytics reading is useful. You do not need to write production code, but you should be able to talk sensibly with developers about states, breakpoints and feasibility.

Prior work: complex user journeys, ecommerce or marketplace experience preferred, responsive design as standard, and evidence you can design for real content rather than perfect placeholder copy. Experience contributing to or working within a design system is a plus.

Soft skills that matter in this studio: curiosity without chaos. The ability to simplify without dumbing down. Comfort presenting to mixed audiences. Collaborative instinct with UI, research and engineering. Resilience when a workshop overturns yesterday’s favourite flow. Warmth and clarity in feedback, both giving and receiving.

Nice to have: hands-on usability testing; exposure to accessibility standards in practice; experience with retail CMS or ecommerce platforms; light UI craft you can lean on when the UI designer is stretched; workshop facilitation; previous work in Manchester or northern agency environments.