Collectivity is an online community for health financing experts to volunteer on healthcare projects in Francophone Africa. Users and project managers must register and create profiles as experts.
Problem:
Collectivity was at risk of losing all funding and being forced to close its virtual doors if they didn’t get the registration right.
Unfortunately, the registration process itself was a roadblock. There were tiny details that had large ramifications for the survival of the project. There was a disconnect between the registration form the site required them 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.
This simple problem actually hid many underlying issues and the success of the site, the projects, and funding hinged on getting this first step right.
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.
Solution:
Results:
The Collectivity platform has grown to more than 1,000 users with dozens of projects volunteers can join and affect change in Africa and Latin America.
Client:
How I Helped:
Role:
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. It’s geared toward high level experts in the fields of health, economics, and sociology.
I was brought on to revamp the previous version of Collectivity to rectify the following issues:
Write realistic personas to drive design and development.
Revise the registration process into one that is usable for both the potential collaborators and the project managers who are seeking volunteers.
User test with platform users: expert volunteers and project managers.
Create a design grid and cohesive colour / design system.
UX & PRODUCT DESIGNER
BRUSSELS & ANTWERP, BELGIUM
Techniques employed: user personas; sitemapping; style tiles; product design; wireframing; remote testing.
FYI: What is health financing and results based financing?
Briefly, imagine the WHO gives money to a particular section of the Democratic Republic of Congo to fund different courses of health research or practice. That money may be earmarked to fund vaccinations, pregnancy check ups, etc. Results Based Financing is a process to collect data on how many people were actually treated and how much of the money was used for its intended purpose and form accountability. The overarching sector is called health financing.
PROJECT CHALLENGES
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 either reduced 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.
AUDIENCES
The audiences are: health economists, hospital administrators, social scientists, government leaders, NGO consultants and more. The projects are currently focused on Francophone Africa but are expanding to Anglophone Africa and Latin America.
Mwanza HONORÉ
PERSONALITY: Determined, Self-Driven
TYPE: The Experimental Sociologist
34 years old, Married with 3 year old child.
Medical Doctor & Health Economist in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. (DRC)
M.D. from U. of Kinshasa; MA Economic Development
Caroline BUIKALU
PERSONALITY: Determined, Self-Driven
TYPE: The Democratic Gate Opener
34 years old, Single; shares a house with 2 others.
Pharmacist in a hospital in Kinshasa, DRC
M.P.H from U. of Kinshasa.
CHARLES MENSAH
PERSONALITY: Academic Leader, Accomplished
TYPE: The Knowledge Holder & People Connector
45 years old, Married with 4 children.
Health Economist for Public Health; Assistant Professor in Cotonou, Benin
MSc, PhD from Belgium and MPH from Benin.
PAIN POINTS
They want to participate in a research project after graduate studies but find limited opportunities and no long term positions.
Have tried to escalate the issues to upper management but may be blocked two levels above them due to lack of resources or internal politics.
Patients/clients are not taking all of their medications due to lack of access at times.
See issues in the supply chain that do not fill patient needs.
Lack of international peer recognition - one’s work isn’t seen as being advanced even with excellent education. This is a problem for African researchers compared to European counterparts.
NEEDS/GOALS
Gain access to the changemakers in policy departments and in the facilties where they work as well as develop bonds with aid agencies or NGOs.
Easily create a profile that highlights academic and professional research projects and expertise.
Do a trial study/collaborative study with patients to address their issues. Bring better financial and physical access to patients.
Engage in Collectivity projects while doing field research or at home with reduced access to the internet. Being able to relay research findings back to the team easily is key.
Ensuring the Ministry of Health collaborates with the CoP Hub.
Contribute to public health reforms in the countries and regions.
IDEATION & DESIGN
“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.
Click to enlarge
THE COMPLETED USER PROFILE
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“I want to be able to show both my expertise and my interests. Just because I am working in a particular field now doesn't mean I want to stay there. I would like to move beyond this current position and explore projects in different subject matters.”
– Collectivity user & interviewee
Collectivity’s expert volunteers are so talented and are always searching for new ways to stretch themselves. We created a way to address and prominently display their different language skills, fields of expertise as well as the areas interest they wanted to explore while collaborating with Collectivity.
USER TESTING
Working with the BlueSquare and ITM team we carried out user testing at both the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp and remotely via Skype with users in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Senegal. User testing was conducted in both French and English.
SOME KEY INSIGHTS FROM SEVERAL ROUNDS OF USER TESTING:
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; changed the order of names to read LAST, FIRST instead of FIRST, LAST, as well as 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.
Participants wanted more control over how they presented their credentials in their profile. This was expressed by capability to add extra coursework, workshops, academic papers, certifications, etc.
Communities
Project managers immediately wanted a way to create subgroups for the communities. This was the number one requested feature out of all the organizational representatives that we user tested.
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.