Client:

Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) – Antwerp, Belgium 

For this role I contracted through BlueSquare, a design and technology agency in Brussels focused on data processing and visualization for healthcare. 

Collectivity is a project created by several academic researchers at ITM to facilitate communities of practice (CoPs) around healthcare issues in Francophone Africa.

Problem:

Collectivity was at risk of losing all funding and being forced to close its virtual doors if they didn’t get the user registration right.

Unfortunately, the registration process itself was a roadblock; tiny details had large ramifications for the survival of the project. There was a disconnect between the registration form the site required users to complete and the users’ own mental model of their professional profiles and needs. Plus, there were technical issues preventing users from saving their information.

Role:

lead UX & PRODUCT DESIGNER

BRUSSELS & ANTWERP, BELGIUM

Techniques employed: user personas; sitemapping; style tiles;  product design; wireframing; remote testing.

Solution:

Partnering with the client and the engineering team, I fully redesigned Collectivity’s entire profile creation process into an experience that reduced user input time by 75%.

By conducting remote and in-person user testing, creating realistic personas that guided a flexible product design, we created a system that volunteers and program managers could use no matter their location or access to reliable internet.

Results:

The Collectivity platform has grown to more than 1,000 users with dozens of projects which volunteers can join and affect change in Africa and Latin America.

• This was the second version of Collectivity and the project owners had to get it right in order to keep the interest of their users and their stakeholders (granting agencies, institutions, and potential partners).

• Notable percentage of users are in countries with reduced internet access at home or workplaces (hospitals) OR are out in remote areas doing field research. The interface needed lightened loaded and to be mobile/tablet friendly.

• Designing an interface that works in both French and English for comprehension and interaction.

• Understanding the perspectives of experts and academics based in the Global South while our team was designing in the Global North.  

• Checking my assumptions about internet usage and adoption for the demographic.

• Balancing the academic needs of ITM and its audience with a brevity in the design that makes the site easy to use.

• Increasing expert volunteer participation beyond the immediate circle of academics familiar with ITM.

Mwanza HONORÉ

Caroline BUIKALU

CHARLES MENSAH

“I lost all my work creating my profile on Collectivity because the system didn’t save it.”

On the old version of Collectivity, experts would spend 15 – 20 minutes filling out one page of profile info only to have the system fail to save it or they would progress without saving correctly due to bad instructions.

SOLUTION: We remedied this by rebuilding the back end code but also designing a handholding navigation that guides users through the profile creation process. They can now exit and save at any time without losing their info.

First time profile creation time dropped from 3 hours to 45 minutes.

Their time is valuable and our system should respect both the health experts’ time and them as people.

• The profile creation directions were presented from a Western European perspective so therefore needed to be adjusted to be clearer for the global population who was actually using the tool. We lengthened the form fields for longer names; we also allowing people to enter their academic credentials before work experience.

• Needed to accommodate multiple authors on projects and research/academic papers.

• Expert profile needed to delineate between physical location and project location so that project managers could quickly review profiles of potential volunteers. They may be working on a project in DRC but be physically located in Ghana.

Conclusion + Future Plans

Based on the fixes with the platform and the hard work of the ITM staff and the demand by several non-profits such as the WHO and MSF, Collectivity was expanded to also include communities and organization profiles.