IDEO.org is out to design an end to poverty by bringing creativity, empathy, and innovation to the social sector. Our goal is to improve the lives of people in poor and vulnerable communities through design and we’re doing it in three ways: through the products, services, and experiences that we design; through the problem solvers we fuel; and by inspiring the social sector to adopt human-centered design.

Position Summary:

IDEO.org is seeking a visual Interaction Designer to join the Financial Health program in San Francisco. You’ll work with a multi-disciplinary team of designers to improve financial inclusion for the world’s poor through Human-Centered Design. You’ll gain inspiration and empathy for the low-income people we seek to serve by conducting field research in East Africa and beyond. You’ll transform behavioral insights into new products, services, and experiences that we’ll design, prototype, and test—then help our partners take these new solutions to market. 

As an Interaction Designer, you’ll make the complex domains of financial services and mobile money simple, accessible, and delightful for low-income people to use. You’ll gain a deep understanding of the technology and tools that the majority of the world uses, where designing for ”mobile” looks very different, i.e., working with the most basic feature phones and spartan USSD text menus. You’ll see these extreme constraints as an intriguing opportunity to develop extremely creative solutions. You’ll be inspired by how technology can leapfrog limitations and painpoints in today’s user experience, as well as imagine new uses for technology to address access, literacy, security, and other barriers. Ultimately, you’ll create innovative user experiences that will help low-income people move from distrust, disenfranchisement, and exclusion to become confident, empowered users of financial services. 

Nerding out over interaction design is a given. Getting passionate about solving challenges for the world’s most impoverished communities is a must. We’ll ask you to wear many hats, but here are a few that we’ll ask you to wear most often:  

You will:

• Turn human behavior and needs into real concepts
• Be obsessed with what design and technology could do for people
• Be a systems thinker: you can logically visualize complex systems, user interaction flows and beautiful user interface
• Demonstrate passion for building, prototyping, and continually evolving digital products throughout the product life cycle
• Articulate the value of design through verbal and visual presentation
• Love collaborating with others
• Show the ability to learn new tools and do self-guided work within a fast-paced environment
• Show that you’re a designer at your core, and you see bringing products to market as an important part of your design passion

You have:

• Strong visual and interaction design work
• Ability to convey concepts through wireframes, flows, storyboards, and mockups
• Fluency in digital design tools, such as Photoshop and Illustrator
• Fluency in creating quick and dirty prototypes (for example: click-throughs with Keynote, interactive prototypes with Flinto or Axure, animations with AfterEffects, etc.)
• Familiarity with coding and/or understanding of architecture for web and mobile experiences 
• (JavaScript/CSS/HTML, Objective-C, etc.)
• Experience engaging and collaborating with third-party developers, stewarding the transfer of 
• design to development
• BONUS: Experience working in emerging markets , creating innovative solutions involving feature phones and familiarity with USSD technology a plus.

You need:

• To be able to distinguish between “good” and “great” work and be able to articulate the difference.
• Experience prototyping and experimenting at different levels of fidelity
• To be able to provide valuable insights and points of view at the intersection of social innovation, business and interaction design
• Cross-cultural design experience
• 3-5 years of work experience
• To be able to travel internationally and domestically 30–40% of the time
• To have U.S. work authorization

Please upload your resume, cover letter, and portfolio.  

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.