Resiliencelinks
A website containing best practices, research studies, and toolkits on preparing global communities to withstand crisis. Extensive user research allowed the team to better understand the needs of humanitarian professionals and how a redesigned website could meet their needs.
Preparing global communities to withstand crisis and thrive.
ROLES
User Research
Lo-fidelity prototyping
User testing
Awareness
What problem are we trying to solve?
What are the organizational goals?
Who are the audiences?
Before making improvements to the existing Resiliencelinks, the team needed to take stock of client desires and existing knowledge of the site’s niche group of users.
During several workshops with USAID, the team gathered information about USAID’s knowledge of the ResilienceLinks target audience, awareness of competitor websites, and mapping the stakeholder landscape.
Target audiences were identified from the workshops and independent desktop research. Several personas were created to give an example of the types of users that ResilienceLinks would likely benefit. Personas were updated as the team gathered data from key informant interviews.
Persona for a foreign service national employee
The old Resiliencelinks home page
Stakeholder map
Competitive analysis of similar sites
Observation
What are people doing today?
What mental models do people have?
After establishing key audiences for this website, we were able to conduct outreach within the USAID network to interview embassy employees, humanitarian workers, NGO staff, and academics.
These community experts, with their particular knowledge and understanding, provided insight on the nature of problems and give recommendations for solutions.
Map of interview participant locations around the globe
What does resilience mean to you?
"The ability to bounce back from natural disaster or some other kind of interruption."
— US Embassy Staff, Dominican Republic
“People are always managing their environments to specific ends despite the fact that the environment is unpredictable."
— Professor, USA
"Resilience is the way a person experiences a situation of hardship and continues living their life."
— NGO employee, Tanzania
“An earthquake is going to happen, but we can control how we equip people and communities to withstand that shock."
— Program Director, Switzerland
Interview Insights
Users have limited time and bandwidth to consume long resources. The majority of KII participants stated that they seek out quick and practical resources to help with their jobs.
USAID and international development jargon makes it difficult to communicate with local partners and populations being served in the field.
The internet is often unreliable for professionals in the field. However, Americans abroad typically have better access than local partners.
Duplication of work resulting in wasted time and resources is seen as a major problem with implementing partners and NGO staff.
User mental models
During interview sessions, participants also completed a card sort exercise. The findings of this exercise were used to inform site architecture and content hierarchy.
Each 3d model represents an aggregation of how all 10 users sorted the topics in ResilienceLinks. Words that are closer in proximity to one another in each cluster had a higher frequency of being sorted together. The card sorting software also lists potential group names based on how users labeled each grouping of topics.
Exploration
How might we consider the whole experience?
Once I completed the card sort and user interviews, I worked with the team’s visual designer to wireframe the new web pages.
I was responsible for creating page lo-fidelity templates in Sketch, while the visual designer took those designs to high-fidelity with her style and brand guidelines.
Validation
How do we know we're on the right track?
After the visual designer and copywriter came up with their new branding for the site, I validated that direction with users through visual preference testing.
Through a test I created in TryMyUI, users reviewed and provided feedback on the website's visual direction. Test participants viewed a prototype containing the new color palette, fonts, and photography.
Visual preference testing feedback
"The colors and images definitely point to inspiring people to help the world."
"I like the way the mission statement explains the organization's purpose. It's very clear, short, but straight to the point."
What I learned from this project.
The original Resiliencelinks was built with USAID goals in mind and not the needs of users. A site with only long form research reports didn’t appeal to users but the addition of toolkits and other content that related directly to their jobs did provide tangible value.
One challenge I overcame was recruiting users for research that matched our target audiences. Additionally, recruitment limitations due to the Paperwork Reduction Act meant we had to stay under 10 users at a time for interviews and testing. Thanks to guerilla recruitment from colleague contacts, we rotated users in alpha (interviews) and beta (testing) pools so that we didn’t exhaust networks while keeping feedback from diverse sources.
Consistent communication with users as we went through the redesign process was crucial. This prevented a lot of potential bottlenecks in decision-making because the client trusted we were a team that was making evidence-based decisions.