Creating Global Connections

Challenge

Develop a peer-to-peer communication platform to help grantees solve similar issues and share new ideas.

Background

The Inter-American Foundation (IAF) is an organization that supports grantees in Latin America and the Caribbean concerning issues of human rights, agriculture, activism, education and enterprise development.

Cydney’s Role

Team Lead | Research| Persona Development | Protoype

Research

After gathering information from IAF, I asked them to describe their current state of communication between IAF and grantees and also grantee to grantee, which revealed the journey map below.

The team learned that our product would have to fill the gaps and replace IAF’s role as a connector. Then, using a combination of supplied research by IAF and several interviews with grantees in Peru, we learned about the communication style of grantees.

Two of our most significant findings were:

Many grantees did not have access to a computer, mostly relying on smart phones
As an oral culture, we needed to figure out how to incorporate audio into the platform

These new discoveries caused us to pivot our platform’s direction halfway through the project.

Persona Development

Limited access and language barriers caused us to be creative when it came to affinity mapping and persona development. We relied on information gathered from the different types of grants described on the website with what we learned from interviews and came up with four different personas.

The personas helped us to meet different types of user’s needs as we planned the platform. The persona I created, was the IAF persona and I modeled her after our contact Amanda.

Prototypes

First Prototype

We started out with a desktop version of the platform because we assumed that all users would have access to a computer and thought that if they were planning a campaign or asking a question, they were probably doing so at a laptop or desktop.

User Testing

When we user tested with Lisa, a member of MINGA and partner of IAF, she told us she found the desktop platform confusing and that most other grantees would not have the same access to technology as she did.

Second Prototype

For the second prototype, the team embarked on a design studio to quickly get to a new solution. Then, Anita took the sketches and combined them into a low fidelity prototype and then I made the wireframes high fidelity.

After our user test and more research, we decided to move away from the computer and more to a mobile design, focusing on Android because our research showed they owned the market share of Latin America. Audio became a huge part of the redesign after we learned that the reading level of grantees varied greatly.

“Thanks again for all of the thought and work you put into developing prototype applications and recommendations for us. This has been an incredibly useful and positive experience and will be an input to our networking/platform strategy.”
—Amanda Fagerblom, IAF Networks and Strategic Initiatives

Email Cydney to learn more about the process and final product.