The posting
About us
We’re a luxury travel company of around 100 people, connecting guests with exceptional villas and helping property owners reach the right customers.
A great experience depends on more than our website. It includes how guests find and book a villa, how owners advertise and manage their properties with us, and how our internal teams support those relationships.
We’re looking for a mid-level Product Designer (UX/UI) to help us understand and improve these experiences. You’ll be our sole designer, with a strong emphasis on user research, customer journey mapping and making complex processes easier to navigate.
The role
Your first priority will be to help us build a shared understanding of our users and their journeys. We don’t yet have a comprehensive view of how guests, property owners and internal teams interact with our business, where they encounter friction, or which improvements would make the greatest difference.
You’ll work with colleagues across the company to uncover those needs, map the current experience and turn your findings into practical improvements. Your work will span digital interfaces and the wider service around them, including communications, operational processes and handovers between teams.
This is a hands-on role for someone who enjoys asking questions, making sense of complexity and taking ideas from research through to clear, considered design. UX will be your main strength, supported by the UI skills to create polished, accessible experiences that reflect a luxury brand.
What you’ll do
Understand our users and map their journeys
- Plan and carry out research with guests, property owners and colleagues through interviews, observation, usability testing and other appropriate methods.
- Map key journeys, from a guest’s first enquiry through to their stay, and from an owner’s initial contact through to their ongoing relationship with us.
- Understand the workflows of teams managing guests, owners, finance and marketing, including the tools, information and handovers they rely on.
- Bring together research, feedback and available data to identify unmet needs, pain points and opportunities.
Turn insight into improvements
- Facilitate workshops that help colleagues understand user needs and agree on the problems to solve.
- Work with business stakeholders and technical partners to prioritise improvements based on user value, business impact and delivery effort.
- Create user flows, wireframes and prototypes to explore and test ideas before implementation.
- Design clear, visually refined interfaces and work with those delivering them to maintain quality.
- Recommend improvements to processes and communications where an interface change alone won’t solve the problem.
Establish a practical design approach
- Create and maintain a shared home for journey maps, research findings and design decisions.
- Develop reusable design patterns and lightweight guidelines to improve consistency.
- Build research and usability testing into projects in a way that suits a small business.
- Agree measures of success and use feedback and evidence to assess whether changes are working.
What you’ll bring
- Experience in a UX or product design role, with a portfolio showing how you’ve investigated problems, used research and developed solutions.
- Strong user research skills, including the ability to choose appropriate methods and turn findings into clear recommendations.
- Experience mapping customer journeys or complex workflows across multiple touchpoints.
- Confidence working with different user groups and balancing their needs with business and operational constraints.
- Good interaction and UI design skills, with an understanding of accessibility and responsive design.
- Proficiency in Figma or a comparable design tool.
- Clear communication and workshop facilitation skills, including the ability to explain design decisions to colleagues outside design.
- The ability to organise your work, identify gaps in your knowledge and seek support when needed.
- A practical approach to working within limited time and resources.
- You may have around three to five years’ relevant experience, but the quality of your work and your approach matter more than a particular number of years.
Useful, but not essential
- Experience in travel, hospitality, luxury services or a business serving both customers and suppliers.
- Experience designing internal tools or improving operational workflows.
- Familiarity with service blueprinting: connecting the user experience to the people, processes and systems that support it.
- Experience using analytics and customer feedback alongside qualitative research.
- Experience working as the sole designer or within a small design team.
What success will look like
In your first six months, you’ll have helped us:
- Establish a shared understanding of our main user groups and their needs.
- Map and validate a prioritised set of guest, owner and internal journeys.
- Identify the most significant points of friction and agree an achievable improvement plan.
- Test and support delivery of initial improvements, with clear ways to assess their impact.
- Establish a repeatable approach to research, design and sharing what we learn.
- The scope and pace of this work will be agreed with your manager, with a focus on the highest-priority journeys first.
How we’ll support you
As our sole designer, you’ll have ownership of your craft and a clear manager to help set priorities and resolve competing demands. We’ll support access to users and colleagues for research, and work with you to keep the scope achievable.
Your primary remit will be user experience and digital interface design. Marketing campaign creative and day-to-day graphic design will sit outside the core responsibilities of this role.
