Consultancy 12 months: UI Designer, Design (Giga), Barcelona, Spain

We are seeking a talented Senior UI Designer to join Giga, an initiative to connect every school in the world to the Internet and every young person to information, opportunity, and choice. The UI designer will work within an interdisciplinary team to develop, prototype, and advise on new products and solutions that will help us achieve the goal of connecting every school, and every community, to the internet by 2030.

UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential. 

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone. 

And we never give up. 

For every child, Connectivity 

UNICEF has a 70-year history of innovating for children. We believe that new approaches, partnerships and technologies that support realizing children’s rights are critical to improving their lives.

The Office of Innovation is a creative, interactive, and agile team in UNICEF. We sit at a unique intersection, where an organization that works on huge global issues meets the start-up thinking, the technology, and the partners that turn this energy into scalable solutions.

About Giga

Launched in 2019 as a joint initiative between UNICEF and ITU, Giga has set the ambitious goal to connect every school in the world to the internet. Half of the world’s population has no regular access to the Internet. Millions of children leave school without any digital skills, making it much more difficult for them to thrive and contribute to local and global economies. This has created a digital divide between those who are connected and those who are not, a divide that has become even wider during the Covid-19 pandemic. UNICEF and ITU have therefore joined forces to create Giga, an initiative to connect every school in the world to the Internet and address this new form of inequality.

Giga focuses on connecting schools so that children and young people have access to information, opportunity, and choice. It also uses schools as anchor points for their surrounding communities: if you connect the school, you can also connect local businesses and services. This creates opportunities for service providers to generate revenue from paying users, making connectivity more sustainable. A 2021 report by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that a 10% increase in school connectivity can increase effective years of schooling by 0.6% and increase GDP per capita by 1.1%.

Based in Switzerland with an open-source technology centre in Barcelona, Giga not only aims to provide children and young people with access to information but also envisions schools as anchor points to uplift entire communities.

Giga is building a Connectivity Credits system. Connectivity Credits are envisioned as a fast and efficient mechanism to enable (small) internet service providers to connect schools in underserved areas. ISPs automatically earn Credits every time they connect a school and can redeem these Credits for a variety of incentives, including subsidies, tax reliefs, or infrastructure access – through respective Ministry of Finance or regulatory bodies, subject to individual country determinants.

The Connectivity Credits system includes many innovative elements which reinvent traditional financing and procurement in order to be ‘fit to size’ for small, local ISPs. These elements are being tested in a number of in-country pilot projects. The learnings from these pilots are integrated into the Connectivity Credits system.

You can read more about Giga’s work at https://giga.global/ and by following us on twitter @Gigaglobal

How can you make a difference? 

Giga seeks a creative, passionate, and self-motivated and UI Designer to expand on, and maintain, the ongoing development of Giga’s Product Suite.

Giga is in the growing stage of developing a series of tech products as part of a larger product offer/suite. The individual in this position will own Giga’s UI development, leading products from design concept stage, development, to MVP launch and performing data-driven, iterative improvements.

As part of Giga’s Design Team, The UI Designer will be working closely with a UX Designer, a Graphic Designer, and a Design Lead (Brand). The Giga Design is a small but multi-tasking team working in an agile way, developing multiple products simultaneously in an ambitious tech-startup environment. The team collaborates closely with external developers/vendors for the product design development.

The UI Designer will also serve to advise on new products, solutions and global trends that will help our products achieve the ambitious goal of connecting every school and every community to the Internet.

Giga takes large ideas and makes them a reality; so being able to communicate complex and abstract ideas using data-driven decisions and clear visual, verbal, and written language is crucial. The candidate should exemplify a strong expertise in Agile/Lean practice and interface design for web-based designs, apps, data information systems, information architecture and systems mapping design.

Key responsibilities include:

• Own and lead the product UI lifecycle, from prototype, MVP launch and ongoing versioned iterations, working closely to UX Designer, Design Lead, and external engineering teams.
• Work closely with the larger Giga Tech Team to continue a healthy evolution and the global scale of current and future Giga products such as Giga Maps, Giga Counts, and NFT and Blockchain products.
• Work and improve on Giga’s current UI design system.
• Implement UI-specific design processes to current team workflows.
• Validate wireframes and create high-fidelity mock-ups that support the technical development of websites, applications, software, and dashboards while ensuring that branding and technical guidelines are upheld across these platforms.
• Work as part of Giga’s Design Team in the development of visually impactful and innovative designs enhancing the current visual identity of Giga.
• Maintenance of the Giga brand across multiple channels and the development of internal and external facing visual assets to support this, ranging from product design to the global giga.global website.
• Coordinate the work of vendors /external partners who will support or iterate on concepts already established by the Giga team, providing design leadership, guidance and ensuring quality of their work.

Please access the full Term of Reference (ToRs) and read a more detailed description of the assignment in this file in order to prepare your financial proposal and know more about the role:  UI Designer FINALv.pdf

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have… 

• Certifications and/or diplomas in design, Graphic Design, Web Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Science, or a related field. *A bachelor’s degree in same related fields is an asset.
• Minimum of 4 years of professional experience in tech product design or UI.
• Experience working with technical/UX design teams to build user interfaces and interactive prototypes, across multiple platforms such as desktop and mobile (Android and IOS).
• Strong understanding of design systems and front-end architecture for products, websites, mobile applications, data visualization and content management systems.
• Strong use of best practices for responsive layouts.
• Expertise and in web design, best design practices of web layout, color, composition graphics and imagery.
• Expert level knowledge in design tools using tools; Figma, Sketch, Adobe CC, and Invision.
• Problem-solving skills and knowledge of capabilities and limitations of web-based technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS.
• A critical design taste and a high attention to detail.
• Ability to lead and turn ideated products and wireframes into prototypes keeping in mind a user-centered approach.
• Skills in communicating and influencing product design strategy.
• Portfolio highlighting multiple projects and your direct contributions.
• Knowledge of UX research and design are an asset.
• Experience working in start-up environments towards scale, with the ability to work with shifting priorities and at times fast-paced deadlines is an asset.
• Being an advocate for Human-centered design in Agile/Lean practices and resource constrained teams.
• Curiosity and willingness to learn about emerging open-source technologies and communities.
• Developing country work experience and/or familiarity with designing for aid development causes.
• Web design experience and knowledge of web-building platforms (WordPress, Drupal) and/or front-end development is an asset.
• Previous experience or familiarity working with systems powered by artificial intelligence / machine learning is an asset.
• Fluency in English is required. Knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish) or a local language is an asset.

Travel:

• The consultant is expected to travel to Geneva one time (1 trip), for a stay of 5 nights.
• The consultant is responsible for arranging his/her own travel, including visa and travel insurance.

Payment details and further considerations:

• Payment of professional fees will be based on the submission of agreed deliverables. UNICEF reserves the right to withhold payment in case the deliverables submitted are not up to the required standard or in case of delays in submitting the deliverables on the part of the consultant.
• The consultant is responsible for his/her own health and travel insurance.
• The consultant is responsible for arranging his/her own travel, including visa.

How to apply:

• Interested applicants are required to submit a financial proposal with an all-inclusive fee. Please see the financial proposal template here: Consultancy Financial Offer template.docx
• Financial proposal must include travel costs (economy class) and daily subsistence allowance, if travel is required as per TOR and any other estimated costs: visa, travel/health insurance.
• Applications without a financial proposal will not be considered.

For every Child, you demonstrate… 

UNICEF’s values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, Accountability, and Sustainability (CRITAS). 

 To view our competency framework, please visit here. 

UNICEF is here to serve the world’s most disadvantaged children and our global workforce must reflect the diversity of those children. The UNICEF family is committed to include everyone, irrespective of their race/ethnicity, age, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, socio-economic background, or any other personal characteristic.

UNICEF offers reasonable accommodation for consultants/individual contractors with disabilities. This may include, for example, accessible software, travel assistance for missions or personal attendants. We encourage you to disclose your disability during your application in case you need reasonable accommodation during the selection process and afterwards in your assignment. 

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles and will therefore undergo rigorous reference and background checks. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check. 

Remarks:  

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process. 

Individuals engaged under a consultancy or individual contract will not be considered “staff members” under the Staff Regulations and Rules of the United Nations and UNICEF’s policies and procedures, and will not be entitled to benefits provided therein (such as leave entitlements and medical insurance coverage). Their conditions of service will be governed by their contract and the General Conditions of Contracts for the Services of Consultants and Individual Contractors. Consultants and individual contractors are responsible for determining their tax liabilities and for the payment of any taxes and/or duties, in accordance with local or other applicable laws. 

The selected candidate is solely responsible to ensure that the visa (applicable) and health insurance required to perform the duties of the contract are valid for the entire period of the contract. Selected candidates are subject to confirmation of fully-vaccinated status against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) with a World Health Organization (WHO)-endorsed vaccine, which must be met prior to taking up the assignment. It does not apply to consultants who will work remotely and are not expected to work on or visit UNICEF premises, programme delivery locations or directly interact with communities UNICEF works with, nor to travel to perform functions for UNICEF for the duration of their consultancy contracts.