UX/Design Contractor — Ecommerce Experience

Responsibilities

• Continuously research competitor and best-in-class ecommerce sites (furniture, home goods, and leading DTC brands generally) to identify strong patterns in layout, navigation, merchandising, and conversion flow.
• Adapt (not copy) the best of what you find into original designs that fit our brand guidelines for each of our three stores.
• Design and iterate on key templates: home page, header/navigation, footer, collection/category pages, product detail page, cart, and checkout.
• Produce clickable, presentation-ready mockups in Figma (or a comparable tool) for review — desktop and mobile.
• Maintain a lightweight design system/component library per brand so improvements stay consistent as pages evolve.
• Present design rationale — what you changed, what you were inspired by, and why it should improve the experience or conversion.
• Collaborate with our development team on handoff; be available to clarify designs during implementation on Shopify (Online Store 2.0 / Liquid theme sections).
• Track a running backlog of experience improvements and prioritize with us based on impact and effort.

Requirements

• 3–5 years of experience in UX/UI or product design, with a portfolio that includes ecommerce work.
• Strong command of Figma (component libraries, auto-layout, prototyping); comfortable presenting and walking through design decisions.
• A sharp eye for competitive research — you can look at 10 sites and articulate what's actually working and why, not just what looks nice.
• A working understanding of responsive/mobile design and basic web/UX conventions (page speed and usability tradeoffs, accessibility basics).
• Ability to work within existing brand guidelines rather than starting from a blank slate each time.
• Self-directed — comfortable owning a backlog of experience improvements and proposing what to tackle next, not just waiting for tickets.
• Clear written and verbal English communication for async collaboration.

Qualifications

• Prior experience designing for Shopify stores specifically (theme sections, Online Store 2.0 constraints, apps like reviews/upsell/loyalty widgets) is a plus.
• Basic familiarity with HTML/CSS — enough to understand what's feasible to build in a Shopify theme is a plus.
• Experience with CRO (conversion rate optimization) or A/B testing tools is a plus.