Inter-American Foundation | Benchmarking Project
What was the problem we solved?
Our client brief was to develop solutions to help IAF, its Grantees and partners to better collect, leverage and report on Grantee project indicators and other project data. With our product, IAF should be able to more efficiently and accurately support and evaluate more grassroots organizations in developing countries/areas in latin america and the caribbean.
How we solved the problem, and my role on the team.
My role in this project started out as leading us on ideation, use cases/user flows and sketching.
About half-way through our sprint, our project manager Stephen wanted to move from managing to full-time prototyping, so I stepped up and took on the roles of product manager and scrum master. I continued to do User Research and prototyping of the desktop and mobile apps as well (we used google video hangouts, google forms and audio recording for testing and interviews, and sketch for prototyping).
Since we could not user test on actual users, I led our team in sticking to the vision of our product being something people in IAF's regions know: android apps and google material design using popular conceptual models, and also matches up with our principles of encouraging easy access to data, clean and simple design, as well as powerful functionality.
Question: What is this all about?
We started our project by figuring out what IAF is all about. I tasked Jim, who worked in international aid development, with researching mobile phone and computer usage in IAF areas (Latin America and the Caribbean). I then began constructing survey and interview questions that would really tell us how the Grantees (users) are currently using the data. We developed English and Spanish surveys and sent them out to everyone the client could provide.
Through all of our research, we found that a majority of people use Android devices one the go in these areas, and that many also may have access to a desktop/laptop computer for "heavy work". We discovered that they are currently entering all data into paper, Excel sheets, and then transferring that to IAF. We found that many women hold "higher" work positions than men (more on this in personas). We started wondering if this was all was too much data for a mobile-only solution.
The Answer: People
Did we have the right problem?
We conducted User Research to find out.
We were able to conduct five interviews (video, phone and in-person) during our 2.5 week sprint. We spoke with several IAF administrators, a third-party data verifier based out of the Dominican Republic (an expert on the user base), and one woman from Jamaica who almost perfectly fit into one of our personas. My biggest takeaway from interviews was that the grantee organizations don't have an easy time entering their data into complex excel spreadsheets - and they tend to just want to tell their story.
What did people actually say?
“The people in the grantee organizations are basically scared of entering data into the GDF spreadsheet.”
“We need a more efficient way to get data into our system, and an easy way to effectively use it.”
What did we learn from our interviews?
Interviews confirmed people struggle with the current system of Excel sheets. We moved to white-boarding and sketching out actual user flows for each potential group: IAF administrators, data verifiers, grantees and beneficiaries.
This helped us see that our scope was enormous. We had to narrow down who we were solving for, and what features those actual people would need.
In the gallery below, you can see our interview notes, and some if my user flows, and features for users in the different groups (IAF, verifier or grantees).
Sketching out the interviews and problems to solve
How did we actually solve this problem?
Answer:
We developed TWO prototypes for a mobile app and a desktop site.
First: We will go through Mobile App prototype
Second: We will cover the Desktop prototype!
We analyzed the Grassroots Development Framework spreadsheets - with the 41 indicators that groups fill in data for, and saw the opportunity for data visualization.
Current look LEFT - How it could look RIGHT:
Then we created all possible features for all the different user groups - the IAF, The Grantees (on the ground), and the data verifiers, and regional beneficiaries / community.
After outlining all possible feature sets, we realized we had to narrow to a single user group:
The Grantee organizations
After interviewing IAF's team, it was clear we had to focus on the Grantee organizations.
The client’s focus might be on evaluating IAF Grantee indicator data, but that there is no way to do that without good, clean, consistent data coming into one system, continually.
Since a main challenge was getting data into the system, we focused on a mobile app to get data into the system, and a dashboard for anyone to see the data in.
The real people doing work with IAF support in Haiti.
We identified our username, but needed to narrow our scope even further.
We landed on The Jamaica Environmental Trust
What is Jamaica Environmental Trust?
"The Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) implements projects under three main focus areas: environmental education, law and advocacy and conservation. Our main projects include Jamaica’s longest running environmental education programme for students and teachers, the Schools’ Environment Programme, which has been in continuous operation since 1997. Our law and advocacy programme works to protect Jamaica’s natural resources using the law, public participation processes, policy review and the media. We stage and coordinate environmental events in Jamaica, including the annual International Coastal Cleanup Day. Our conservation work has included monitoring of sea turtle nesting and the patrol and management of the Pedro Bank fish sanctuary." Source: http://www.jamentrust.org/projects/
Who would be using our application?
How could we put a human face on this?
We started with about six potential personas, and narrowed ourselves to just two - Lucinda for Mobile, and Cristina for desktop.
We decided upon a woman named Lucinda for the user on mobile, with less education and technical comfort, who enters data into the system daily. Below are some of the sketches for our mobile application.
Android is popular in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Once we knew we were building an Android mobile application for the actual people on the ground in these grantee organizations, it had to help them enter their "indicator" data consistently (as opposed to filling out paper reports on water toxicity test reports in the rain, on a beach), so those involved at all levels can see it as it is entered, organize themselves with a calendar system, and self-organize with a community function in the application.
Mobile is where everything is going in IAF's areas.
material design - a conceptual model our users know
In the process of trying to conduct user testing, we had limits on travel and performing actual user tests, so for this sprint, we looked at a few models that work. WhatsApp was the main app inspiration for our mobile app. It is used by 1 billion people, especially in Latin America, looks familiar, and works.
Design Inspiration - WhatsApp Messaging
These are WhatsApp prototypes (not my work)
Design Inspiration - Mint.com mobile app
These are Mint.com's prototype images (not my work)
Mint, like WhatsApp, showed us that clean, easy Material design works great for data visualization, and could be the conceptual model we use to make our app familiar to users.
Sketching our mobile app
Our mobile app sketches below started out in Spanish and English, showing all the basic needs of Lucinda - jump in, see the status of your main data points, add some data, checkout your goals/objectives, and read some news from your community.
We started testing our sketches
Stephen testing the sketches on Raamish
TEAMWORK = And the app becomes real
After testing our app on several users in both English and Spanish, we found that there was a need to make it light and simple.
As the iterations progressed, we found that implementing google material design would be in keeping with popular conceptual models, and it just looked good.
To right - Vianka and I, working with Sabrina, from the IAF Badging team:
We even coordinated with another GA group working on an IAF project, their app was social media, community and badging to drive involvement. We all agreed on similar language to make our client's lives easier, and the branding seamless across prototypes.
The mobile prototype becomes real.
Our prototype app is called "THE SPARK". This means "LA CHISPA" in Spanish. It changes based on language selection. The idea is to create a SPARK in Grantee countries, collect higher quality data, so that IAF can support more grassroots groups.
We used the login methods seen above in WhatsApp, to make the process easier for this particular user group. The app starts off with their tasks for the day, moves into goals and progress tracking, then calendar and what their next IAF events are, and closes with social media and community updates. Everything is customizable.
Color coding follows each data point or indicator all the way through the app.
Wait, what about that whole dashboard thing?
Upon interviewing the IAF/client users, it was apparent that a big part of the request was to give them a way to leverage and visualize their newfound, consistent data from their grantee organizations.
Therefore, we provided a prototype of a web dashboard that all administrators on the project (our clients included) could use to review, evaluate, report on and use data to grow their organization, and help IAF's mission by making every data point and report consistent, coming out of the same system.
Who would be using this dashboard?
Let me introduce you to Cristina!
Design Inspiration - Mint's Desktop dashboard
We started sketching out the dashboard
Our initial sketches bear out a dashboard to look at a specific project, and I also wanted to include some reporting aspect, which will help our client (IAF) more efficiently report back to it's stakeholders for funding, approvals, etc.
Last but not least, our dashboard becomes reality.
Our final desktop application prototype was done in Sketch, along with Mobile, and we kept our target of making it lightweight, easy, and flexible. As you can see below, the dashboard shows a quick view of overall project indicators, then allows users to drill down, and build a report.
Final desktop prototypes
How the heck did we explain all of this?
Given the size of the project, depth of research, and fact that we created two working prototypes, we did our best to keep it lightweight. We told the personal stories of each persona who would use each prototype, and everyone talked the same amount in a set order.
The overall accomplishment was sparking new ideas with our client, IAF, in how the can collect data using mobile, and have everyone make better use of it in a business-intelligence like dashboard for grants / development work.
Big thanks to Amanda at the IAF!