UX​/UI Designer — Pre-Trip Customer Experience

Company Introduction

World Strides is the global leader in educational travel and experiential learning. The company was founded in 1967 to provide middle school travel programs to Washington, D.C. and has grown to provide a wide range of programs for more than half a million students annually to over 100 countries around the world. World Strides offers experiential learning programs in educational travel, performing arts, language immersion, career exploration, service-learning, study abroad, and sports.

Each of these experiences helps students to see beyond the classroom and to see the world – and themselves – in new ways.

Pre-trip is where families decide whether to trust us with their kids and where students decide whether they are excited or anxious about the trip ahead. It is one of the highest-leverage digital experiences in the company. We are building a focused in-house UX/UI design capability and this is a founding hire. You will build core components of the World Strides interactive design system: the visual language, component library, and interaction patterns to be leverage more broadly across experiences.

You will work across multiple pods in the pre-trip space, partnering closely with product managers and engineers. You will own the look, feel, and design execution of what we ship: clear flows, well-crafted screens, a consistent visual language, and prototypes that help us answer questions quickly. You will also work closely with our Voice of Customer (VoC) team, leveraging their stakeholder research, experience evaluation, and insights infrastructure to answer the “is it usable” question as it relates to UX/UI design craft.

Here is how we are building product. You don't need to lead this — you do need to thrive in it.

Discovery is the moat. AI makes generation cheap. The bottleneck is no longer "what do we build" but "are we solving the right problem." Sharp problem framing beats ten solutions chasing a fuzzy one.

Portfolios over roadmaps. We run broad, lightweight experiments in parallel and double down on what's working. We do not defend a 12-month roadmap; we defend a thesis and a learning velocity.

Prioritize attention, not resources. Human judgment on what's worth testing and what the results mean is the scarce resource. We spend it deliberately.

Generate fast, judge slow. Use AI to produce many candidate problem frames, concepts, and prototypes quickly. Apply rigorous, deliberate user validation and strategic bets before scaling.

Smaller teams, bigger ownership. Autonomous pods own full problem spaces end-to-end. PMs are accountable for outcomes, not feature counts.

Raise the quality bar. Speed-to-generate must not substitute for depth-of-value. We tighten outcome thresholds, not loosen them.

Strategic sequencing. Cheap experiments must compound into defensible architecture, not pile up as disconnected features.

• The UX and UI interaction design for features across the pods you support — flows, screens, component patterns, interaction details, and visual polish.
• Figma work product: clean files, reusable components, sensible naming, ready handoff to engineering.
• Establishing the foundation for the World Strides digital interaction design system, including the component library, type scale, color system, spacing rules, and patterns for the pre-trip experience, respecting alignment with existing brand and digital marketing treatments while ensuring what you build is optimized for your use cases.
• Quick, low-fidelity prototypes when we need to test an idea, and high-fidelity screens when we are ready to build.
• Honest, transparent prioritization of your time across the pods you support — in partnership with the PMs.

• Turn problems into screens. Take a problem statement or a rough idea from a PM and produce flows, wireframes, and high-fidelity designs that are usable, accessible, and on-brand.
• Use AI to move faster. Use AI tools to generate variations, draft copy, explore visual directions, mock imagery, and speed up the parts of the job that used to take days. You don't need to be an AI expert — you do need to be curious and willing to fold…