The UI/UX Engineer plays a critical role in creating intuitive, accessible, and engaging digital experiences that enable entrepreneurs, field teams, and partners to interact seamlessly with Inkomoko’s digital products. Reporting to the Head of Products and Innovation and working closely with Product Managers, Software Engineers, and business stakeholders, the role is responsible for translating user needs into scalable, human-centered digital experiences that drive adoption, efficiency, and measurable business impact across multiple countries.
Key Responsibilities
Product Discovery & Customer Experience (30% time)
- Participate in product discovery sessions to understand business problems and user needs.
- Conduct customer journey mapping across digital and offline touchpoints.
- Develop user personas and behavioral segmentation.
- Identify customer pain points and translate them into design opportunities.
- Support Product Managers in validating hypotheses through user research and experimentation.
Design and Functionality for Users (60% time)
- Identify gaps and challenges in UI/UX and propose improvements for change, working through the development process with end users.
- Gather and evaluate user requirements in collaboration with product managers and developers.
- Illustrate design ideas using storyboards, process flows and sitemaps.
- Design graphic user interface elements, like menus, tabs and widgets.
- Build page navigation buttons, search/input fields.
- Develop UI mockups and prototypes that clearly illustrate how sites/apps function and look, present to stakeholders for feedback, and iterate as needed based on feedback and functionality.
- As we expand into new geographies, conduct user research and product testing with new market segments.
- Proactively and effectively communicate to project sponsors.
- Work closely with developers to implement the approved designs and approaches.
- Develop and maintain Inkomoko’s enterprise Design System, including reusable UI components, interaction patterns, accessibility standards, typography, icons, and branding guidelines.
- Ensure consistency across all digital products and platforms.
- Design responsive experiences optimized for web, mobile, tablet, USSD, and low-bandwidth environments.
- Apply accessibility standards (WCAG) to ensure products are usable by people with varying literacy levels and abilities.
- Use analytics and usability metrics to continuously improve user experiences. Identify and troubleshoot UX problems (e.g. responsiveness).
- Coordinate with the QA Analyst for generating insights on any usability issues.
- Adhere to Inkomoko style standards on fonts, colors and images.
- Use Asana and Jira to record project status and documentation.
Other User Experience Supports (10% time)
- Serve as the in-house expert in user experience, including supporting other staff to work HCD processes to create better user experiences (even non-tech ones).
- Coordinate with other colleagues for project prioritization along the IT Roadmap.
- Support and backup other IT colleagues as needed and other duties as assigned.
- Proactively identify development needs and raise those for plans for approval and implementation.
- Troubleshoot for all users, particularly for high-value users like directors.
Requirements
- At least 5 years experience with creating user experiences in digital interfaces.
- Previous experience working with low-digital literacy clients in rural areas in East Africa.
- Coding experience preferred in our stack: Python, XML, Javascript, Postgresql.
- Great communication skills with a diverse team.
- A champion of HCD with lots of empathy.
- Commitment to fixing the problem, not promoting one solution.
- Graphic design skills and experience building wireframes and storyboards.
- Fluent in written and spoken English, plus at least one other East African language.
Education and Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in User Experience (UX) Design, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Interaction Design, Information Technology, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Graphic Design, Digital Design, or a related field.
- Advanced proficiency in industry-standard UI/UX design and prototyping tools such as Figma (preferred), Sketch, Adobe XD, Adobe Creative Suite, or equivalent.
- Demonstrated knowledge of Design Thinking, User-Centered Design (UCD), Information Architecture, Interaction Design, and Accessibility Standards (WCAG).
- Experience with responsive and mobile-first design principles and designing for web and mobile applications.
- Understanding of front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) to facilitate effective collaboration with Software Engineering teams (preferred but not mandatory).
- Professional certification in Google UX Design, Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Design Thinking, or equivalent is an added advantage.
- Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, Computer Science, Information Systems, Digital Innovation, Engineering, or a Business-related field is an added advantage.
