Job title: UI/UX Design Associate
Type: Internship, part-time, 10-20 hours per week, from October 1 2026 to March 31 2027
Location: Remote, worldwide
Language: English at a conversational level is sufficient
Compensation: Unpaid internship with a defined path to a paid contract or full-time role after a 3-month performance review. Academic credit supported where a school allows it.
About the company: Melora Connect is association management software built for small associations and chambers of commerce - organizations under 500 members who have been priced out of or buried by the enterprise platforms. The product is built. We are a small team putting it in front of its first customers, which means everyone here works on things that matter immediately rather than on practice projects.
Why this role exists: The product works. Whether it feels workable to the office manager of a 200-member trade association - not especially technical, twenty minutes before a board call, genuinely worried about breaking something - is a different question, and nobody has answered it yet. Every platform in this category is built either for large associations with real staff or as generic self-serve software that assumes you will figure it out. The opening we are going after is software one non-technical person running an association alone can actually operate. That is a design problem before it is an engineering problem, and right now nobody owns it.
What you will do:
- Redesign the flows that carry the product: member signup and renewal, dues, event registration, board reporting. These are the screens people touch under time pressure.
- Own the first-run experience - what a new association sees in its first week, working alongside whoever is building our migration and onboarding process. A migration that succeeds technically and still feels frightening has failed.
- Build the design system: components, type scale, color, spacing, states, documented and consistent. Right now there is not one.
- Do real usability testing. Watch people use this who are not you and not us, and bring back what you learn, including the parts we will not enjoy hearing.
- Take accessibility seriously: contrast, keyboard navigation, focus states, screen reader basics. Association memberships skew older than the average SaaS user base.
- Hand off to engineering and watch it ship. You will work directly with the person building the product.
Honest framing on stage: we are early. There is not a stream of live usage data to iterate against yet, so the first months are foundational - the system, the core flows, the research setup - rather than optimizing against dashboards. If you want to set the visual and interaction language of a product before it has one, that is a rare thing to be handed.
Who we are looking for: You have a portfolio with at least one project you can walk through end to end - the problem, what you tried, what you threw away, what changed and why. One deep case study beats twelve thumbnails. You are fluent in Figma. Most importantly, you design for people unlike yourself: our users are not designers, not young, not patient with software. If your instinct is to make it look impressive, this is a hard fit; if your instinct is to make it obvious, it is a good one. You can defend a decision without saying "clean" or "modern". Any HTML and CSS is a bonus, not a requirement. No design degree needed - self-taught, bootcamp, career-changer and student designers are all encouraged. Applicants worldwide welcome.
What you get: a documented design system and shipped product surfaces for your portfolio, real research experience in a domain almost nobody designs for, direct work with the founder and the engineer rather than three layers down, structured training through our Melora Institute curriculum, and a substantive written reference.
Skills required: UI design, UX design, Figma, wireframing, prototyping, user research, design systems, web accessibility, visual design, conversational English. Nice to have: HTML and CSS.
