Frame

Focus

Form

Forward

Frame

Focus

Form

Forward

Delegates move from room to room all day, yet the information lives across six systems for a static desk

United Nations App

United Nations App

My UN gives delegates one place to see today's meetings and the documents behind them. Two years of UN analytics showed 90% desktop use, but interviews told a different story: delegates try their phones in the hall and give up, so they miss room changes and document releases. To answer one question, where do I need to be? They check six systems built for desktops, by different teams, in different years.


We owned the app end-to-end, design, UI/UX, cross-device behavior, testing, store submission. The UN owned the data. I led the design system and design flow: the five-tab navigation, the Today, Organs, Meetings, and Documents screens, and a WCAG 2.1 AA Storybook system of tokens, components, features, and pages. That architecture, token structure, and page design carried into the app's merged foundation. I used Copilot, AI prototyping, and the classic pen n' paper. One design system, one navigation model, sitting on top of data the UN already had, so a delegate sees today and its documents in one place.


We released the beta for 15,000 delegates during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) 2026 in New York City in September 2026.

Things to keep in mind

Reasoning

UN x GitHub’s mission is in practice here: accelerating human progress through open-source in all 193 member states.

Delegates negotiate decisions that affect every country. They should spend their energy on the negotiation, not on finding the room or document or updates.

Goal

A delegate opens the app and knows where to be, what’s being discussed, which documents matter, and what changed since they last looked. My goal underneath that: one design language we could build from.

Dynamics

Six weeks is a deadline that wouldn’t budge with UNGA.

Volunteers available for 5-8 hours/week

Public data only, no authorization flows. English at launch and phone portrait only.

Every string scaffolding had to stay ready for six languages and RTL Arabic, even though the shipped UI was English-only.


DGACM approval is required

Context

The research said it plainly: delegates lacked a usable way to access what is relevant when it matters.


Users wanted recognition over recall first and a first time view of what is relevant

A time-first view of what’s relevant to them.


The 90% desktop number hid the real behaviour, delegates tried to use mobiles and abandon it.


Every existing platform was built by a different team in a different era (gov, delegate, e-journal)

Formation

Map the whole app on one page

Delegates didn't lack information. They lacked a way to find it. The research put it plainly: "Clients do not actually struggle with a lack of information. They struggle with how that information is organized and accessed." So, in reading the documentation for all six APIs, I found what each user journey could stand on. Then I mapped every source to one of five pages: Today, Meetings, Organs, Documents and MyDesk. Together they organize the app by time, structure and theme, since delegates think in all three. The hardest question was the home page. What does "happening right now" mean when six systems don't agree? Every page broke down into features, sub-pages and states, down to an empty Today or a cancelled meeting. Scope finally had a shape.

Form 02

Build a layered design system

This time crunch meant straightforward and rapid design. I built a system that could answer questions without me. It has four layers: tokens, components, features and pages. Tokens set color, type, spacing, shape, motion and icons. Components range from simple chips to the filter panel and cards. Nishiki and I shipped it all in Storybook and theme.ts. This let UN leadership and DGACM react to real screens and settle real questions early. From there, anyone on the team could assemble a screen. Engineers built from components and design froze on schedule.

Form 03

Prioritizing diplomacy networking over discovery

Delegates don't follow the whole UN. They follow a handful of the roughly 80 organs. During UNGA, about 20 meetings can run at once. Browsing all of them isn't a workflow- it. is noise. So the app lets a delegate track organs they work on. This carries through to meetings, documents, agendas and proposals. Follow the Fifth Committee, and Today fills with its meetings, documents and announcements. The MVP had no login, so it saves everything on the device. This gives us most of the value at a fraction of the cost, with no auth backend and no privacy review. Relevance decides what a delegate sees first. Today stopped being the UN's schedule and became the delegate's own day.

Form 04

Design for diplomatic networking

Diplomacy runs on who you know. Delegates come to UNGA to build relationships as much as to attend meetings. That's been true for decades, but the platforms never supported it. So I built finding people into the navigation itself. Delegates can find each other by organ, sub-organ or member state, then save a contact to stay connected. This wasn't a nice-to-have. It supports the behavior underneath the meetings.

Form 05

Catch what the UN beautiful brand color hides

An app for 193 member states has to work in every language and on every corridor's Wi-Fi. Rather than patch that in later, I built it into the tokens. My favorite detail is small. Uppercase styling lives in the token as textTransform: 'uppercase', never in the text itself. Pre-uppercased strings break in Arabic and Chinese, and fixing that later means touching every screen. Layouts are RTL-safe, the app works offline first, and everything meets WCAG 2.1 AA.

Results

The app shipped to private beta on iOS and Android on September 19, distributed by TestFlight, APK, and QR code, ahead of UNGA in New York. My UN was designed for about 15,000 delegates across 193 member states. It runs on iOS, Android and web from one codebase, with six languages ready to go. For the team, one Storybook system replaced screen-by-screen handoffs. For the UN, it meant a public, store-ready product for its biggest week of the year. For delegates, one app replaced about 10 platforms, WhatsApp threads and bookmarked PDF.

150 delegates tested it during UNGA in September 2026 with a 84% satisfaction rate

Any delegate from 193 member states can now open the app on iOS, Android and web

The design system holds 29 components, 45 features, and 19 pages, with four layers enforced in CI

Next

Now that any maintainer can quickly see why someone was blocked, the next constraint is cross-repository trust. During interviews and testings, maintainers repeatedly said that whether someone's been blocked on another repository/organization is a great trust signal, but it comes with its own risks.

Takeaways

This was never an information problem, it was an organization problem. Decisions outlive the branch that carries them when they're named, layered, and written down where someone else can build on them. And the boring question, how are we consolidating this, matters more early than late. Two organizations need to name the conflicts before they show in a merge.

Collaborators

Ankit Kumar Honey (engagement lead)
Nishiki Liu (front end), Diana Diakité (user research)
James McNamara, Melissa Pastore, Cynthia Lo
David Pomerenke, Matthew Sutcliffe (UN EOSG).

Next project

Accessible communication on mixed-reality (XR)

Lead UI/UX designer

visionOS (self)

Accessible communication on mixed-reality (XR)

Lead UI/UX designer

visionOS (self)

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devyanijain4@gmail.com

Contact

About

Projects

Play

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LinkedIn

devyanijain4@gmail.com