1. Background

Ubongo is Africa's leading producer of kids' edutainment, creating fun, localized, and multi-platform educational content that helps children learn and improve their lives. Reaching tens of millions of households across many languages and countries, Ubongo distributes its edutainment across TV, radio, mobile, and digital platforms - ensuring broad accessibility for children and caregivers across Sub-Saharan Africa, including those in low-connectivity and rural areas.

The Adaptive Learning App

As part of its digital learning strategy, Ubongo is developing an Adaptive Learning App: a habit-forming learning experience for young children, rooted in Ubongo's Child's Learning Journey Curriculum (CLJC) and designed for the technological realities of Sub-Saharan Africa. The app targets children aged 3–6, with the intention of scaling to older children and additional learning areas over time.

The app personalises each child's experience through adaptive learning pathways — sequences of learning objectives and activities that adjust to a child's pace and performance, reinforcing mastery of foundational skills and supporting differentiated progression. The adaptive approach is what allows the app to meet each child where they are, rather than delivering a single fixed sequence to every learner.

Designing for African users and contexts

The product must be appropriate for the realities of children and families in African markets. The successful consultant will design for, and around, the following conditions:

• Low-cost and lower-specification Android devices
• Limited or intermittent internet connectivity
• Low mobile data capacity
• Shared-device use (one device used by several children and adults)
• Children with limited or no reading ability
• Parents and caregivers with different levels of digital literacy
• Home and other everyday learning contexts
  
  

2. Objectives

Ubongo is seeking a UX/UI or product designer who can conduct or support user research, define user journeys and product flows, design interactions for young children, create and test prototypes, build a scalable design system, and prepare clear, developer-ready design specifications.

Working closely with Ubongo, the consultant will help us to:

• Understand the needs, behaviours, abilities, and constraints of children, caregivers, teachers, and other relevant users
• Translate the learning framework into a usable digital experience
• Define the child and caregiver facing experiences
• Develop and test an interactive prototype
• Create an engaging, age-appropriate, accessible, and intuitive interface
• Define reusable interface components and interaction patterns
• Prepare designs and specifications that can be handed to a development team
• Reduce product, usability, learning, accessibility, and technical risks before development begins
  
  

3. Scope of Work

A. Project familiarisation and design planning

• Review available product, strategy, research, content, brand, and learning-design documents
• Conduct working sessions with the core Ubongo project team
• Identify assumptions, unanswered questions, risks, and research priorities
• Develop a UX/UI workplan aligned with the wider product plan
• Help clarify the scope of the MVP from a user-experience perspective
  
  

B. User and contextual research (UX research)

The consultant should lead or support research involving relevant users, children aged 3–6; parents and caregivers. Research should explore:

• How young children interact with mobile devices
• Independent versus adult-supported use
• Shared-device behaviour
• Digital literacy
• Language and literacy constraints
• Connectivity and device limitations
• Accessibility needs
• Caregiver concerns, including screen time, safety, and trust
• Motivations and barriers to continued use
• How children understand instructions, feedback, navigation, rewards, mistakes, and progression
• Willingness of caregivers to subscribe and pay for an app
  
  

C. User experience definition

The consultant should produce:

• User group profiles or personas, user needs, and key use cases
• User journeys and service or experience flows
• Information architecture and navigation structure
• onboarding and permissions flow (for kids and caregivers)
• Child profile and shared-device flow
• Learning-session flow
• Content download and offline-use flow
• Progress and return-user flow
• Error, interruption, and recovery flows
• Relevant teacher or facilitator flows, where included in scope

Throughout, the experience must address the fact that the main child user may not be able to read.

D. Learning experience and interaction design

Working with the Learning Architect, the designer should translate the learning framework into digital interaction patterns, including:

• Structure of a typical learning session
• Transitions between videos, stories, audio, and interactive activities
• Audio-led instructions
• Feedback for correct and incorrect responses
• Scaffolding and hints; repetition and remediation
• Progression between activities and representation of achievement and progress
• Appropriate use of characters, animation, rewards, and encouragement
• Natural stopping points and child-friendly handling of errors
• Interaction patterns for adaptive recommendations
• Consideration of cognitive load, attention span, motor skills, and developmental ability

The consultant should help define reusable activity and interaction patterns, such as:

• Tap-to-select; drag and drop; tracing; sorting; sequencing
• Counting; sound identification; shape or number tracing
• Simple listening and response activities
  
  

E. Wireframing and prototyping

The consultant should:

• Create low-fidelity wireframes and review flows with stakeholders
• Produce a clickable prototype for sharing with the internal team
• Develop a more realistic interactive prototype for testing with children and caregivers
• Iterate the prototype based on evidence
• Clearly distinguish prototype functionality from final production functionality

The prototype should cover the core end-to-end user journey, rather than only a set of attractive screens.

F. Usability testing

The consultant should plan to support multiple rounds of testing with intended users. Testing should examine whether:

• Children understand what to do without relying on written instructions
• Touch targets and gestures are appropriate
• Children can navigate independently or with limited support
• Children understand audio and visual feedback, and can recover from mistakes
• The experience is engaging without being overstimulating, and session length is suitable
• Adults understand onboarding, consent, profiles, progress, settings, and downloads
• The product works appropriately in shared-device and low-connectivity contexts
• The experience creates confusion, frustration, or unintended behaviour

The consultant should provide testing protocols, observation tools, documented findings, and prioritised recommendations.

G. Visual interface design (UI)

Once the core experience has been tested, the consultant should create visual designs that are:

• Appropriate for children aged 3–6
• Consistent with Ubongo's brand and characters
• Engaging but not visually overwhelming
• Clear on smaller screens and suitable for low-end devices
• Efficient in terms of file size and performance
• Appropriate across the intended languages and flexible enough to support localisation
• Accessible to children with different needs

The designer should determine how Ubongo's existing characters and visual assets can be used, without allowing decoration to undermine usability or learning.

H. Design system

The consultant should create an initial, scalable design system covering: typography; colour use; spacing; layout; buttons; touch targets; navigation; cards and content containers; icons; audio controls; media controls; progress indicators; feedback states; error states; activity components; modal and adult-gate patterns; offline and download indicators; accessibility guidance; animation and motion principles; and character-use guidance where relevant.

The design system should allow future teams to add new pathways, activities, languages, and content without redesigning the product from the beginning.

I. Accessibility and inclusive design

The consultant should define accessibility requirements and recommendations covering, where relevant: children with visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive/developmental differences; colour contrast; large touch targets; audio alternatives; captions and visual cues; use of colour; animation and motion; simple language; clear instructions; input timing; error recovery; and reduced dependency on fine motor control.

The consultant should identify what can realistically be included in the MVP and what should form part of the longer-term accessibility roadmap.

J. Developer handover

The consultant should prepare: organised source design files; developer-ready screens and components; interaction specifications; component states; responsive or device behaviour; animation and transition specifications; asset-export guidance; accessibility annotations; content and localisation guidance; design-system documentation; prototype links; user-flow documentation; and handover sessions with the selected technical team.

The consultant may also be required to provide limited design quality assurance during development, to confirm that the implementation matches the agreed designs.

4. Expected Deliverables

1. Inception report and UX/UI workplan

2. Review of existing materials; design assumptions & gaps

3. User research plan and research tools

4. Research findings and prioritised user needs

5. User groups, personas, or audience profiles

6. User journeys and experience maps

7. Information architecture and navigation model

8. Key user flows

9. Low-fidelity wireframes

10. Initial clickable prototype

11. Usability-testing plan and protocols

12. Findings from child, caregiver & adult-user testing

13. Iterated high-fidelity interactive prototype

14. Final visual interface designs

15. Initial design system and component library

16. Accessibility and inclusive-design specifications

17. Developer-ready files and interaction documentation

18. Final design handover package

19. Handover workshop

20. Optional: design quality assurance during development

5. Required Qualifications and Experience

Candidates may be individual consultants, a small design studio, or a product-design agency.

Required or strongly preferred experience

• UX/UI or digital product design
• Designing mobile applications young children, preferably ages 3–6
• Interaction design; user research; usability testing
• Audio-led or audio-supported interfaces
• Designing for low-connectivity environments and lower-specification devices
• Accessibility and inclusive design
• Design systems and developer handover
• Working with cross-functional teams
• Translating educational, behavioural, or research requirements into product experiences

Please note: experience in branding, illustration, or graphic design alone will not be sufficient. This assignment requires demonstrated UX, interaction, and product-design capability.

6. Management and Reporting

The consultant will report to the Product Manager and work closely with the Learning Architect and other relevant Ubongo teams (working sessions; progress updates; presentation of findings etc).

7. Proposal Submission Requirements

Bidders should provide:

• Understanding of the assignment and the Proposed methodology
• Workplan and timeline - including ownership/roles
• Relevant experience on similar projects for children (At least two or three relevant case studies or portfolio examples showing complete user flows, interaction design, prototyping, and tested products)
• Description of the bidder's usability-testing approach
• Availability
• Financial proposal, with daily or stage-based rates and a breakdown of professional fees and other expenses
• Assumptions; risks and dependencies

Bidders should distinguish clearly between work completed personally by proposed team members and work produced by wider teams at previous organisations.

9. Submission details

Submission Deadline: 31 July 2026

Submission Method: Email to shama@ubongo.org and jackie@ubongo.org

Subject Line: RFP: UI/UX Designer (Adaptive Learning App)

Expected start date: 10 August 2026

Contract Currency: USD

Additional Terms

• Ubongo reserves the right to accept or reject any proposal.
• This RFP does not constitute a commitment to award a contract.
• Any cost incurred in proposal preparation is the responsibility of the bidder.
• Ubongo reserves the right to negotiate final deliverables and payments before contracting.

Ubongo is an equal opportunity employer and procurer. We actively welcome proposals from women-led firms, African-owned enterprises, and organisations with demonstrated commitment to diversity and inclusion.

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