Consultancy: User Experience & Interaction Specialist, Office of Innovation, New York, USA (11.5 Months)

The UNICEF Office of Innovation is seeking a strong self-motivated top-level User Experience & Interaction Specialist. Duration: 11.5 months. Duty Station: New York

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. 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 startup thinking, the technology, and the partners that turn this energy into scalable solutions.

UNICEF's Office of Innovation creates opportunities for the world's children by focusing on where new markets can meet their vital needs. We do this by:

• Connecting youth communities (or more broadly -- anyone disconnected or under-served) to decision-makers, and to each other, to deliver informed, relevant and sustained programmes that build better, stronger futures for children.
• Provoking change for children through an entrepreneurial approach -- in a traditionally risk-averse field -- to harness rapidly moving innovations and apply them to serve the needs of all children.
• Creating new models of partnership that leverage core business values across the public, private and academic sectors in order to deliver fast, and lasting results for children.

The Office of Innovation specifically looks to form partnerships around frontier technologies (like drones and UAVs, blockchain, 21st century skills, urban technologies, new banking tools, wearables and sensors, or 3D-Printing) that exist at the intersection of $100 billion business markets and 1 billion person needs – and to identify how they can grow and scale profitably and inclusively

We're an interdisciplinary team around the world tasked with identifying, prototyping, and scaling new technologies and practices. With our partners, we focus on convening and collaborating on new and different solutions, low- and high-tech,  by:

• Looking at the 2-5 year horizon to evaluate emerging and trending technologies and to see how UNICEF can work with the private sector on doing better business while improving essential services for children;
• Investing in early stage solutions that show great potential to positively impact children in the 0-2 year future including the Venture Fund that invests in open source technology solutions from start-ups based in UNICEF’s programme countries;
• Identifying proven solutions that can be implemented at national scale in multiple countries – taking the ideas that help thousands in one country, bringing them to dozens of countries across multiple sectors, and impacting the lives of millions of children.”

How can you make a difference?

We seek a strong self-motivated top-level User experience & Interaction Specialist who can maintain strong design sensibilities even under tight time constraints, who can work with a diverse interdisciplinary team to create a plan of action to best communicate ideas visually and who can maintain clarity in their work while juggling and prioritizing several projects at once. This position will range from project support to owning projects and seeing them through to completion.

We seek someone who can work closely with Innovation Fund team to support start-ups in the investment portfolio as well as work with in-house project teams, but who also can prove they can task manage and follow-through on projects independently. Due to the diversity of the role, the team is looking for a hybrid designer, who can ideally work across various devices and platforms. The candidate should exemplify a strong expertise in user experience and user experience and interaction design, research and consultation for web-based designs, apps, and data information systems, information architecture and systems mapping design.

The ideal candidate will be a user experience and interaction professional who has experience with complex systems and who is able to toggle between a number of projects at the same time. The ideal candidate must have a strong sense of UNICEF’s programmes and goals, who expresses a passion for designing for social impact through their portfolio, who has experience communicating easily with a diverse range of staff and who has a knack for extrapolating information from team members that can be translated into simplified and articulate way.

• Work closely and play a supportive role between the Data Science & Engineering Team and developers to continue a healthy evolution and upkeep of the Magic Box platform.
• Provide support and capacity building to Innovation Fund-supported portfolio companies
• Create mockups and wireframes for websites, software, and dashboards for different projects, as necessary and ensure branding guidelines are upheld across the various mediums.
• Produce user requirements, personas, storyboards, scenarios, flow charts etc to give shape to any preliminary idea.
• Support on maintaining and evolving other products that have digital interface components.

To qualify as an advocate for every child, you will have....

UNICEF is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages all candidates, irrespective of gender, nationality, religious and ethnic backgrounds, including persons living with disabilities, to apply to become a part of the organization.

Remarks:

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

Duration: 11.5 Months

Duty Station: New York, USA