Climate Resilience Designer at International Rescue Committee

Major Responsibilities

• Ensure UCD tools and solutions are fit-for-purpose: Tailor the GRIP’s UCD practices, activities, and outputs to our contexts and our colleagues’ bandwidth across the various stages of design including: design research, testing, and product development.
• Product design: Guide the team in considering solutions spaces based on existing evidence, user research, scalability, and market analysis. This may entail collaboration with Behavioral Science colleagues to create behavioral maps, proposal of prioritization frameworks, facilitation of brainstorms on potential scaling pathways, and syntheses of key informant interviews.
• Prototype Creation and Testing: Connect the dots between user research, evidence and expert direction from the team, and generating testable prototypes. Examples of prototypes include low-fidelity print outs, clickable mockups, sample messages, high fidelity mock-ups of service experience, user journeys, and illustrations to test for understanding.
• Prototype testing: Work with the team to test prototypes with key users and collaborators (remote and/or in person where possible).
• Final assets: Ensure final assets are of high quality, print ready, and implementation ready. Sample outputs include insights from the initial user research, product strategy, program feedback, program implementation, solution storyboards, and final program recommendations.
• Sourcing and Building Teams: Build and maintain a local network of collaborators and partners who can support the development of new products and services, including individuals, collectives, implementers and start ups. You should also have experience building relationships, onboarding, training and facilitating collaboration among diverse partners with varying degrees of familiarity with design.
• Piloting: Co-create instruction guides for using and implementing final assets, partner with the monitoring and evaluation team to draft questions to be answered during the piloting phase, and adapt the final assets and guides after the pilots based on feedback from the research conducted by the M&E/project team.

Job Requirements

Work Experience:

• User-Centered Design experience of 5+ years
• Digital design experience of 2-3 years.
• Portfolio demonstrating digital and non-digital design projects in low-resource settings in the Middle East, Africa, and/or Asia.
• Preferred experience working in agriculture, livelihoods, and climate resilience.
• Preferred experience working with smallholder farmers, low-literacy adults, displaced populations including refugees, and other vulnerable groups.

Demonstrated Skills And Competencies

• Visual Design: Building high quality visual design from scratch and create simple, credible brand systems. This includes creating graphics, illustrations, printed and digital materials.
• Interaction Design: Creating hand-drawn, static and clickable mockups that are clean and appropriate for team, partner and user communication; able to use established patterns for web, mobile and tablet apps.
• User Interface Design: Making effective choices of UI elements and create new elements which are designed and styled effectively.
• Qualitative Research: Designing and implement effective quality research programs in person and remotely that accommodate the other demands and constraints often placed on team members. Training others in qualitative research as well as creatively leverage proximate skills.
• Experiment Design: Able to design an effective lean experiment, analyze results and help partners and team members interpret data and make decisions.
• Tools: In line with our efforts to de-colonialize our tools and practices, modify tools and UCD approaches to suit the context and the implementer. Willing to seek out and learn new tools when necessary.
• Communication: Excellent verbal, written and visual communication skills as well as, an overall ability to be clear and concise in all communications, especially with non-designers. Conducts themselves with respect and empathy when engaging with clients and colleagues. Seeks out and incorporates feedback into their work.
• Flexibility: Creates contingency plans and is able to adjust quickly and with good humour when things don’t go according to plan

Language Skills

• English
• Strong preference for French working proficiency

Working Environment

• Mix of remote and in person work. Applicants must have a home or alternate workspace they can effectively complete their work from during regularly scheduled work hours.
• Up to 30% travel to the Middle East, Africa, and/or Asia is expected, Covid-19 restrictions permitting.