Senior Product Designer

Ameelio has quickly established itself as the future of prison communication and virtual learning. We were recently chosen as one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential Companies and received a New York Times Good Tech Award. Ameelio launched the nation’s first free prison video conferencing platform and is currently operating 6 states – Iowa, Colorado, Maine, Rhode Island, Illinois, and Indiana.

As we prepare to scale, we're looking for a full-time hire to join our small and nimble product team to help us in building the nation’s first free prison communications platform.

What You Will Be Doing

Conduct all stages of UX research: identifying, planning, driving, conducting, analyzing, and reporting out insights.

• Structure and lead the research portion of projects by identifying the most powerful questions to ask field actors and collaborate with colleagues to create new tools and methods that help answer them
• Build empathy for peoples' needs first-hand by conducting interviews and interviewing experts
• Guide colleagues through insights from research then translate those into action by visualizing complex systems and prototyping potential solutions
• Translate findings into action by sketching and testing ideas iteratively with users
• Support research efforts with qualitative analysis and occasionally conduct secondary research to understand new problem areas and opportunities
• Make connections between disparate research initiatives. This can be done by: identifying existing research that supplements a new initiative, looking for commonalities in findings to surface larger “macro” insights, through data triangulation, and/or by combining similar research efforts.
• Create high-quality deliverables that tell compelling stories integrated with research findings. This is typically accomplished through reports, presentations, video recordings, etc.

Lead the UX design process: from rapid prototyping to high-fidelity design handoffs

• Deeply understand the technology and features of the products and have a working knowledge of the end-to-end product.
• Create design concepts and drawings to determine the best product.
• Create the deliverables (e.g user flows, low fidelity wireframes, high fidelity mockups, prototypes, and so on) that solve real user problems through the user experience.
• Proactively identify both small and large usability issues, and help influence their prioritization
• Communicate the results of UX activities with a strong point of view to the UX department and other interested team-members using clear language that simplifies complexity
• Identify and influence the prioritization to fix UX debt when it occurs.
• Organizing handoffs to the technical team
• Modify and revise existing designs to meet customer expectations.
• Identify opportunities for product or feature enhancements.
• Use appropriate software to produce prototypes and test functionality.

Influence strategy

• Work with product and account managers to influence the overall product strategy and roadmap to ensure that our deployed solutions achieve desired impact at various scale
• Build tools, processes, and systems that make it easier and more accessible for the rest of the organization to engage with and conduct high-quality user research and design thinking methods
• Advocate for resources and support efforts to include justice-involved individuals’ perspectives in both high-level strategy and concrete product decisions

Who You Are

Minimum Qualification

• At least 3 years of professional experience in human-centered design
• Experience designing on multiple platforms (iOS, Android, desktop web, etc.)
• Interest in the end-to-end design process. You’ll own the entire design process, from identifying project tasks to conducting tech handoff; performing user research (generative and evaluative) to diving into UX/UI design. 
• Confidence in the face of ambiguity to decide between different research methodologies and design thinking frameworks
• A strong focus on prioritizing shipping features to our core users
• An experienced and collaborative team player 
• Experience working in startups

Preferred Qualifications

• Involved with or impacted by the criminal justice system
• Passionate about working with marginalized communities and tackling challenges related to poverty and inequity
• A lifelong learner, dedicated to experimenting with new research methods and pushing their craft in new ways
• Deeply curious and highly attuned to human behavior and emotion
• Multidisciplinary

Why You'll Love Us

• A welcoming and collaborative environment with people who are dedicating their lives to fighting the commercialization of incarceration
• Experience working closely with users who rely on our product to stay in touch with their loved one
• An environment for rapid experimentation and ownership
• Ownership of entire systems and features that deliver society-changing impact
• Contributing to the foundation and culture of a young and growing organization
• Experience working cross-functionally and exposure to a variety of business functions
• An incredibly high bar for velocity of shipping and the quality of your work
• Comprehensive health insurance coverage.
• Flexible and remote working environment.
• Compensation: $100,000 - $120,000

About Ameelio

Ameelio is a nonprofit technology company that builds free technology to accelerate the creation of a more humane and rehabilitative justice system. Our tools will enable 27 million Americans to communicate with their incarcerated loved ones for free, organizations to scale their social services, and educators to empower incarcerated people through virtual learning. We are a technological bridge that reconnects incarcerated people with their families and vital resources — for free. Our tools will help improve post-release outcomes, lower recidivism rates, and help America safely reduce the size of its prison populations.

Company History

Ameelio was an all-volunteer effort until late-2020. Today we've built an A-team that brings together technical and criminal justice expertise, and participated in: Mozilla's Spring MVP Lab (won 1st place), Fast Forward Accelerator, Robin Hood BRL program, and Visible Connect's Accelerator. 

We’re backed by Schmidt Futures, Mozilla Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation, Google.org, and Fast Forward accelerator. Our funders also include Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and Square, and Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures. Our work has been covered by Forbes, TechCrunch, Fast Company, The Washington Post, Business Insider, and others.

• Website: ameelio.org
• Twitter: twitter.com/teamameelio

External References

• TIME: 100 Most Influential Companies
• Bloomberg: Nonprofit aims to disrupt pricey prison telecom industry
• Fast Company: This app is making it free for incarcerated people to make video calls
• Forbes: The Prison Communications Nonprofit Backed By Twitter’s Jack Dorsey And Former Google Chief Eric Schmidt
• Washington Post: Let inmates talk to their families for free
• Tech Crunch: Ameelio wants to take on for-profit, prison-calling rackets after starting with free letters to inmates
• Fast Company: This app bypasses the absurdly high cost of making phone calls to prison by converting texts to snail mail

Problem We're Solving

The $1.4 billion prison communications industry generates obscene profits by charging extortionate prices to the incarcerated and their loved ones. Families spend up to $500 a month to stay connected to their loved ones inside. A 15-minute phone call runs as steep as $25. Our work has never been more important. Because of COVID, prisons have shut down all in-person visitation. Low-income families have few options to communicate with loved ones.

Exclusive contracts leave prison telecommunications companies unchecked by competition: former FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn called the industry “the clearest, most glaring type of market failure I’ve ever seen as a regulator”.

Poverty and incarceration are viciously tied: over 50% of incarcerated people had no income eight years preceding their arrest. For-profit prison companies entrench this cycle. One in three families with incarcerated loved ones is forced into debt ( $13,000, on average) by the cost of maintaining contact.

This is a social and moral disaster.

The Solution

A suite of free prison communications and virtual learning tools that connect the incarcerated with their loved ones, service networks, and colleges, which will improve post-release outcomes.

Connect: Video Conferencing, eMessaging, Voice Calls

Reconnecting the incarcerated with their loved ones and supporting the next generation of remote prison programming.

Learn: Virtual Learning

Enabling the incarcerated to access a wealth of digital educational resources, earn college degrees, trade certifications, and chart their own path to successful reentry.

Mail

App that bypasses the absurdly high cost of making phone calls to prison by converting texts, photos, games & news to snail mail. We currently have over 3500,000 users in all 50 U.S. states, and in 42 countries.