UX Designer

About Our Product Support Team: Everyone on our small Global Product Support Team are mission-driven self-starters who want to help our open-source community project thrive. The UX Designer is a key role to making our product remaining a world-class EMR with high-impact for those environments we serve.

We help sustain our community and software project through technical collaboration with many organizations and volunteers. The Global Product Support Team helps coordinate this effort. Currently we are creating the next generation of the OpenMRS product: “OpenMRS 3.0” or “O3”, leveraging technical contributors in our community's multi-organizational Frontend Squad. More on the history of O3 here; and development docs here. 

• Seeking: UX Designer

• Length: 7 months with opportunity to extend, part time

• Location: Remote (Global)

• About our technology: OpenMRS’ flagship product, the Reference Application or “RefApp”, is meant to enable busy health system staff to provide care that is safe, well-informed, and efficient. The RefApp must perform smoothly on both tablets and desktops. We leverage Carbon Design System with additional OpenMRS-specific patterns (see http://om.rs/o3ui ). For design tools we prefer hardware-agnostic, web-hosted tools such as Figma and Miro. New features for the RefApp are often built through “feature squads” composed of multidisciplinary team members from diverse community organizations. 

Role Overview

• Under the direction of the Director of Product, work as a member of the Global Product Support Team and with the OpenMRS community to address a wide variety of product design challenges for new features, workflows, and alternate modalities, including mobile/tablet and desktop interactions.

• Advocate for users and design solutions, highlighting inputs that influenced the decisions including business and user goals, demographic and usage data, and research findings.

• Lead the design for new experiences and improvements of existing experiences.

• Quickly iterate on multiple interactive design solutions with the community and work through details to arrive at a final design for handoff to the engineering community members.

• Develop high level, detailed storyboards, mock-ups, and prototypes to effectively communicate interaction and design ideas, and leads to a RefApp that inspires implementers as to what is possible with the OpenMRS product.

• Deliver work that’s not only user-friendly and aesthetically engaging, but which also produces meaningful results for end-users to provide efficient and effective real-time care for patients.

• Work closely alongside engineers and product managers throughout all stages of the production cycle to ensure needs are understood and addressed, and compatibility and feasibility for programming into the product.

• Assess and optimize the performance of new and existing features by actively participating in user research and assessing performance metrics. (For example, a Gap Analysis of the current state of the O3 RefApp vs past designs, and updates to designs or requirements.)

• Develop and maintain detailed user-interface documentation. (For example, expand the OpenMRS UI Pattern Guide, such as Icon patterns, incomplete sections, and more.)

• Maintain a transparent working style with the community, including presenting design work early and often to multiple stakeholders for review and feedback.

• Contribute to the community’s shared knowledge and culture of user-centered design and research methodologies.

• Support forums for community members to get feedback on design needs (such as in Squad meetings or other venues).

• Support Community Feature Squads ad-hoc, allocating more time where needed. Identify mentorship opportunities where coaching squad leads and BAs from member organizations will enhance sustainability and community capacity.

• Work with the Director of Product to proactively seek out representative test users, site-visits, and shadowing opportunities, especially in LMIC settings. 

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience as a user experience designer, interaction designer, or similar role

• 2+ years of experience with “CarbonMRS”, the combined use of Carbon Design System and the OpenMRS 3 styleguide and UI Patterns

• Fluency in best practices for web-based information architecture and design

• Strong knowledge of usability principles and techniques

• Experience working in a collaborative multi-disciplinary team and working directly with product managers during problem discovery, and with developers for implementation of designs

• Flexibility to accommodate working with collaborators in various international time zones

• Excellent communication skills. We’re a distributed team, so frequent and clear written communication is a must. 

• Experience with development collaboration and tracking tools; such as Miro, GitHub, issue tracking (Jira), wiki (Confluence), communications (forum and Slack). 

• Access to high-speed internet for team and community real-time calls (e.g. via Zoom, Slack Huddle, etc).

• Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal. 

Desired Skills and Attributes

• Bachelor’s degree in design, human-computer interaction (HCI), or 5+ years equivalent professional experience.

• A portfolio or samples of work demonstrating experience creating great user-centered design solutions.

• Experience designing and shipping products for tablet and desktop.

• Experience with a variety of design and prototyping tools such as Figma, Sketch, or equivalent.

• Experience working with electronic medical records or other health information systems used at the clinic or point of service level.

• Familiarity with how open source projects are developed. Ideally past experience contributing to major open source projects.

• Experience with healthcare and/or LMIC settings (e.g. awareness of resource requirements, on-prem deployment practices). Experience outside of the humanitarian or healthcare industry is also highly desirable (fresh ideas).

• Past experience working with, coaching, and learning from folks from very diverse cultures. 

• Experience working with global teams.

• Self-driven work ethic & problem-solver. Self-starter who loves taking initiative and seeing things through to completion. 

Travel Expectations

This role is not expected to travel internationally, but may have opportunities to travel up to 15% of the time with expenses funded/reimbursed by OpenMRS Inc., and supported by the OpenMRS Inc. Operations team.

Compensation

Rates commensurate with experience and location the person is based. Location is determined by the country where the person is residing at the start of the contract.