Readvertisement - Consultancy 12 months: Senior UI Designer, Office of Innovation (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.

Role Location - Barcelona

Please be aware: The job location is Barcelona. Applicants are invited to adjust their financial proposals to reflect this.

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...Innovate

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.

UNICEF and ITU have launched “Giga”, a new initiative to connect every school to the internet, and every young person to information, opportunity and choice. It also serves as a platform to create the infrastructure necessary to provide digital connectivity to an entire country, for every community, and for every citizen.

Providing connectivity to the world remains a challenge. According to the ITU, nearly 3.7 billion people remain unconnected from the internet, and by extension, unconnected to digital products and services that could dramatically improve their lives. Approximately 29% of 18-24-year-olds, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa, do not have digital access (~360m people) and thereby lack access to the same information, opportunity and choice as their more-connected peers. Unless things change, a big part of this rapidly growing group of young people is in danger of being left behind, excluded from the modern digital world.
Closing the digital divide requires global cooperation, leadership, and innovation in finance and technology. Giga leverages data, innovative finance and new technologies to bring the power of meaningful connectivity to fast-track young people’s access to educational resources and opportunities.

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. The individual who is equal parts visually aesthetically strong as technically skilled, also has innate drive for:

• Designing state-of-the art interfaces
• Maintaining user-facing design sensibilities across products and
• Collaborating with diverse interdisciplinary team to communicate and execute ideas.

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.
Experience designing products across various devices and platforms, ideally for low-bandwidth environments is favored.

In particular, as an UI Designer, you will:

• 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 GigaMaps, GigaCounts, 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:  TOR Senior UI Designer.pdf

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

• Bachelor's degree in Design, Graphic Design, Web Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience. 
• Minimum of 5 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, colour, composition graphics and imagery.
• A critical design taste and a high attention to detail.
• 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.
• 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.
• Fluency in English is required. Knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish) or a local language.

Travel:

• 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. 

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
• Attach Portfolio and web link showcasing previous work and projects.
• 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.