Senior Product Designer – Youth Development Labs (YLabs)

Youth Development Labs (YLabs) (www.ylabsglobal.org) designs innovative solutions that address the complex and nuanced challenges young people face today. We work with governments and local partner organizations to create, scale, and evaluate solutions designed with and for young people. Our team brings a unique mix of human-centered design, adolescent medicine, implementation science, and impact evaluation to all our projects.

Founded in 2014, our organization has worked in fifteen countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Central America on sexual and reproductive health, mental health, HIV/AIDS, and youth employment. We have offices in Berkeley, California and Kigali, Rwanda.

SUMMARY

YLabs is seeking a Senior Product Designer to support CyberRwanda, a youth-facing digital platform that combines an edutainment webcomic, with sexual and reproductive health and economic empowerment information and online ordering of contraceptives and other pharmaceutical products. This hands-on role will support a small and nimble team with the implementation phases of a multi-year, flagship design project in using digital education to improve the health and livelihoods of urban adolescents in Rwanda.

The Senior Product Designer will take initiative in shaping the future of the program based on the needs of users, stakeholders, and our partners. He/she will be working with a team to conduct and synthesize late-stage user research (qualitative and quantitative), and advocate product changes based on user research insights.

The ideal person will be excited to work with a dynamic cross-functional team of designers and healthcare professionals flexing their creative problem-solving muscles. He/she is interested in both the “big picture” of the work and getting their hands dirty, advocating for users, synthesizing user research into meaningful insights, creating clear, compelling communication materials, and prototype services and products at different levels of fidelity.

A quick thinking, curious, and empathetic designer who has experience in service and product design will thrive in this role.

CORE RESPONSIBILITIES

Product Design: Design UX deliverables that are grounded in users’ needs e.g. convey concepts through wireframes, flows, mockups and prototypes; and communicate coordinate with product manager and developers.
Service Design: Design offerings through the many service touchpoints required to get an offering into the end-user’s hands. This includes user-facing communications, internal workflows, technology and product interactions, scripts and inter-personal communications.
Translating complicated service flows and complex sets of insights into clear, concise artifacts.
Communication: Translate and communicate complex ideas across departments and stakeholders as well as the ability to simplify those complex ideas into succinct data points.
Capacity building: Utilise and involve junior designers in the design process, building their design capacity and fluency with CyberRwanda product and service.
Feedback: Collecting strategic feedback and metrics from your designs and creating improvements on the platform based on data.
Strategic Alignment: Approach and map out ideas or problems with holistic systems thinking providing perspective on various components and how they affect each other. Work closely with the Product manager to align project goals and reporting.

YOU HAVE

• Experience and confidence in all stages of a design project including user research and testing, prototyping, service design blueprints, and developing user-centered deliverables.
• A firm understanding of UI design is highly desirable.
• Experience with data synthesis (ie. Google Analytics) and using data to inform and bolster your designs.
• Strong verbal and visual communications skills with both developers, content developers and designers.
• Experience in hiring, collaborating with and managing freelance designers and/or other vendors.
• Proven experience crafting innovative design solutions within complex service systems is a plus.
• 2-3 years of experience in human-centered design methodologies and practice.
• At least 3-5 years of experience in design strategy, UX, service design, or design research is required.

DESIRABLE

1. Bachelor or Masters degree in Interaction Design, Service Design, User Experience Design, or related design discipline preferred.
2. Experience working in Rwanda and/or East Africa broadly; proficient Kinyarwanda is a plus.
3. Eligibility to work in Rwanda is a plus.

LOCATION

Under normal circumstances, this role would be based out of the YLabs Rwanda Kigali office. Given the current circumstances due to COVID-19, it is possible to conduct this role remotely within GMT+0 to GMT+4. There is an expectation that this role will be based in Kigali once normal office life resumes.

BENEFITS

Salary range: RWF16,150,000 to RWF38,000,000 gross, commensurate with experience.

HOW TO APPLY

Send your CV and portfolio (link or PDF) to talent@ylabsglobal.org with the email subject line “Senior Product Designer – Rwanda”.