The Inter-American Foundation (IAF) provides direct development assistance through grant support for grassroots organizations throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. 

Objective

A digital tool that provides project participants a roadmap to building new skills. And for grantees it provides a global overview of project progress. The result is a community that develops its human capital, which is necessary to ensure the success and sustainability of grantee projects.

role

As a member of a 3-person team working on this project, my role consisted of leading the visual design, creating hi-fi mockups in Sketch and prototyping in Keynote and InVision. I leveraged my Spanish fluency during user research and leading stakeholder interviews in Spanish.

I collaborated with the team on user research, user interviews, sketching, usability testing, iterations, and client-management recommendations.

What exactly are Grantees looking to track?

We began our research by reviewing IAF project descriptions to better understand the goals, players, and activities of each project. I was able to provide additional insight about projects to my team from videos that were only available in Spanish.

We used a technique known as affinity mapping to see if we could group together common themes within projects. 

We identified some common activities around education specifically workshops and training, but ultimately concluded that because projects are so diverse, our design would have to be customizable in order to be applicable across a range of project types.  

Is it a project management tool?

To help grantees track activities, we started to sketch ideas for what looked to be a strategic planning document in a project management tool - it broke things down by goals, milestones, and activities.

But we asked ourselves- What would be the incentive for project participants to enter information into a tool like this?

"Communities carry out the project themselves. It's not just about bringing electricity, but improving social and human capital" - Michela

User Interviews - A-ha moment

As we continued ideating we conducted interviews with IAF program staff who were also able to put us in touch with grantees like Michela from the Guakia Ambiente. What we learned from these conversations was how essential it is to empower individuals within communities - that of the importance of human capital development for projects to be successful. Grantees want to track activity to measure human capital in a community

Discovering an opportunity - pivoting to a new solution

We abandoned our initial idea to create a project management tool that focuses on the needs of grantees and instead found an opportunity to build a digital tool around the idea of human capital development that would focus on the "base" or the community's project participants. 

The tool would recognize the essential role of community members like Maria in these projects. Since community members would be the ones entering activity data that grantees like Jessica need to track, we wanted to ensure they found the tool valuable.

We knew from our research that external rewards wouldn't be a sustainable motivation for community member to input activities. A common theme among the videos was how empowered community members felt when they developed their own skills and how it contributed to the development of their community. 

Inspiration in the unexpected - Digital Badge System

We were inspired by the Girl Scouts of America and their mission to empower girls to achieve their potential and service to their community. They have a badge system that lays out step to gain new skills. We would apply this idea to our tool.

The central feature of our tool would be a digital badge system -communities come together to determine badges that represent skills for the project. After completing and logging in activities, project participants earn the skill and are rewarded with a badge. 

a.  This screen provides users with a full listing of all the badges that they can select and work toward earning.

b.  Users learn more about the skills they will gain and the activities they need to complete to earn the badge.

c.  I lead the hi-fi mockup design. With limited space on the screen, I opted for a badge design that contained both the title and icon. This would also serve users with limited reading abilities. 

d.  From testing we also learned that a light box design would allow users to easily select and exit out of badges without navigating away from the badge guide screen.  

Now and Later

With the badge system as a main features we designed two ways that community member could log in activities.

1. Users can log activities in realtime, as they participate in the activity by selecting "Check-In Now".

2. Users can also "Log Past Activities" that they attended in the past.

Community Badge Summary

For the Community Badge Summary we were inspired by the layout of the Obama Dashboard used in 2012 elections. This allows community members to see how their individual contribution is part of the whole. This global overview is especially helpful for grantees to assess at a glance the various skill areas of their community.

Test & Refine

The menu screen evolved as we iterated based on the feedback of users. 

A Note on Technology

We learned from user interviews and research that Android phones are the most widely used smartphone in Latin America. Android conventions helped establish a context for our design. Future iteration would explore more integration of material design principles.

While most households have a smartphones, SMS integration would allow more users to interact with the app. Each event/activity has a keyword that a community member would text to a shortcode. On the back end, organizers set up a question flow to capture relevant information.  

Next Steps

• Test with more users - We provided IAF with the prototype to use when visiting grantees and we are actively testing with Michela and her team at Guakia Ambiente for feedback and recommendations.

• Version for grantees/organizers  -  Will need to build out and clarify permissions for grantees who have unique capabilities such as creating new badges and making announcements.

• Desktop interface - Create a desktop interface and explore different ways grantees can view the data. We also recommend exploring integration with the grantee platform for reporting on indicators to IAF.

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