Women in Action, part of ActionAid.
A new platform, offering users a chance to join a digital community focused on real social change for women around the world.
Project overview.
Timeline:
Core team:
Amran - Role: UX lead, Facilitation, Project management
Swarali - Role: UI lead, Visual design, Prototyping
Roberta - Role: UI lead, Visual design, Prototyping
Stakeholders:
Keri: Client & Decision maker
Additional Contributors:
Melissa: UX/UI, Amir: UX, Rasheeda: UX
What is the concept?
The product is “Women’s Power Accelerator” (WPA). A new online giving platform where the public become members for a monthly fee.
The money raised is distributed to projects around the world by ActionAid. The projects are completed and along the way, content is created to share back to the members, in the form of stories, videos or webinars.
What is the challenge?
The Scope:
Using existing research to understand how to build the WPA so it has features and usability ready for 1 to 1 user testing.
The Goal:
To build an MVP that will help test the concept of the WPA. A proof of concept.
How much do we know?
The project is at early concept stage and built on assumptions. Initial validation consisted of a survey conducted in two of ActionAid’s fundraising countries, Sweden and Brazil.
Key insights from this survey included:
70% very likely to sign up for a fundraiser
Strongest support from 18-29 and 30-44 year olds
Monthly flexi donations were popular
Both men and women are interested
Having access to digital content through webinars and impactful stories was enough to keep them interested
Want to be part of an exclusive online community
Little difference between users in either country
Workshop #1.
As the facilitator I ran a series of workshops with the wider team to define the product.
Benchmarking
The first step in starting the project was to understand the market. We used additional survey research the client provided to benchmark the product against others, to see what we could quickly learn.
User Work
We built a persona and user journey, to help focus and contextualise the product for the team.
Workshop #2.
The second workshop focused on building out our findings onto a screen.
The Storyboard
The next step was to storyboard the product. I framed this around developing and answering the questions for the 1to1 interviews.
The focus here was: The on-boarding experience and The exploration/engagement experience
The User flow
This helped to build the user flow: the minimum pages we would need to enable the questions to be answered, followed by a wireframe to visualise it on a screen.
The wireframe
Workshop #3.
Led by the UI team, we explored the look & feel of the site. This helped gauge how far the client wanted to move away from the ActionAid brand. We explored:
Imagery
Typography
Colour scheme
Icons
Button styles
Balance between text/image
This formed the basis used to build the medium fidelity prototype ready for external content writing.
The protoype.
The final prototype consists of:
Landing page, Learn more page, Sign-up/payments page, Rewards overlay, Profile page, Video page
Feedback from the ActionAid team saw a name change: Women in Action. I was able to create a logo to make the prototype feel more real and align better with ActionAid.
What are the next steps?
I ran the project as a Design Sprint, focusing on a ‘good enough’ approach as guided by the client. I learnt a lot about working with expert team members and how to get the best out of our time.
Additional insights were built into the final prototype to help with testing. This included translation of the initial mock-up to suit testing countries.
My recommendation to the client to test the finding of “Little difference between users in either country” led to the addition of the US and Spain.
User interviews have been held in November 2023, which I have participate in this to observe and learn.
Once the proof of concept is validated the product can move onto further development, which would include refining; the product offering, the financial model, and the implementation.
