The Open Food Network UK team are seeking a passionate and creative customer and service experience designer to help us refine and optimise the end to end experience for our customers – the food producers and food hubs that are our network.

About the Open Food Network (OFN)

During COVID the Open Food Network UK has grown from a community of 20 regional food networks to a community of over 50, with more producers, shoppers and communities joining every day. These amazing food hubs and producers are working their socks off providing good food to good people across the country. Our vision is a national (in fact international) network of food enterprises that put their communities and the planet first. We envisage a world in which all food is produced using agroecological methods and is distributed in such a way that communities thrive and everyone is well nourished! 

Can you help us make this happen?

The role

We’re looking for someone that can fit seamlessly into our compact team and take responsibility for developing our overall end-to-end customer experience so we can retain existing hubs and recruit new ones to the platform. You will pull together a number of existing strands from the amazing work of our support team – providing one to one support, to the wealth of resources we have such as videos, our community forum and our user guide. Our ideal new team member will help us to organise and prioritise our offering with our users/community in mind.

Your main responsibilities will be:

  • Understand how our users find the information they need at every stage and touch-point of their journey with us
  • Design and develop the journey for users to improve the overall experience such that our food hubs and food producers have what they need to thrive
  • Implement design improvements to our WordPress site.
  • Work with our current and potential users (food hubs and food producers) to help create thriving food enterprises across the country
  • Work with the existing team to create a cohesive experience across all touch-points.
  • Define how we measure customer experience and implement systems and processes to facilitate this.
  • You will work on a range of projects; from the longer term large-scale to the fast-paced and experimental. You’ll be ready to tailor your approach for each situation.

Our ideal next team member will:

  • Have experience in creating end to end customer experiences. Experience in information design, open source, UX and/or visual design desirable.
  • Be skilled in creating design artefacts (eg personas, task-flow storyboards) but not be attached to them. We have a small, part-time team so we want someone that uses tools like this pragmatically.
  • Have a good working knowledge of WordPress. We also rely heavily on GDrive, Slack and VTiger.
  • Have a clear understanding of how less-technical people interact with tech platforms and find joy in making this easy
  • Have a practical understanding of alternate routes to market within the UK food system and the challenges these kinds of enterprises face.
  • Be a skilled facilitator and an excellent listener. You’ll probably already be aware that the food sector brings with it strong personalities and identities and you’ll enjoy working with these kinds of characters.
  • Be driven to put communities at the centre of food systems!

This is a 6 month 0.5 FTE position with the possibility for extension dependent on funding.
Salary: £32,000-£39,000 pro rata dependent on experience.

We’ve always worked remotely and probably always will so you’ll need your own computer.  The whole team is currently freelance but this is changing and open to discussion. Our team is non-hierarchical so you’ll be working with all of us. From experience we know this requires a special mix of humility, accountability and autonomy. If this all resonates with you then we can’t wait to hear from you!

Applications are now closed for this post.