War Child Holland is considered the leading organization in the provision of psychosocial support to children affected by war within what they call child-friendly spaces.From among their innovation projects, one focuses on improving feedback in the communities in which they work and
making people aware of grave violations of international humanitarian law, how to report them, among others. This time, War Child Holland needed a digital solution for this, and approached Made by People to be their design and development partner in this innovation challenge.
The following case study describes how Made by People helped War Child Holland in the development of MyVoice, a feedback and learning platform, to collect feedback from children participating in this program, thereby helping community volunteers learn how to run these programs effectively. We will go in-depth into the UX research, usability testing, ideation, and software development processes undertaken by Made by People to arrive at a successful solution.
UX research in Malakal, South Sudan
The first step taken by People Made was conducting UX research in Malakal, South Sudan, with the view to understand the needs, aspirations, and constraints of target users. It was to develop a tool that would be intuitive and easy to use-even though most of the users have low levels of written and spoken literacy in a different language.
For this study, Made by People mobilized a team of researchers with extensive experience in conducting user research within low-income countries. They employed a variety of methods: focus groups, interviews, and observations, better to understand the needs and challenges of users. Moreover, the team was sensitive to the cultural issues and difficulties involved in conducting research in a country torn apart by war.
The following section discusses the key findings from this research that have gone into shaping My Voice.
First, the people in these villages either did not have much access to technology or, if they
did, it was shared between several people at once. Secondly, literacy rates were very low, and that made it quite difficult todevelop a tool which was going to be usable by this target population.
Thirdly, the users were speaking a different language, hence the tool had to be localized in order for them to understand it.
Application Development
The development of the app followed. Using the insights garnered from UX research, an intuitive and user-friendly app was developed by Made by People. The design would be for tablets but would include an admin dashboard for management. This Learning and Feedback app was developed by using an
Android platform, while Laravel, HTML5, and JavaScript are used to build the Management Dashboard. It was deployed using Amazon Web Services with MySQL running the database.
Usability Testing
The usability testing has been an integral part of the My Voice project, which allowed us to hear back from its users and make changes to the app based on their feedback. After the development of the application, Made by People conducted two sets of usability studies in order to get early feedback from the users.
Both these usability studies were conducted in Malakal, South Sudan, with participants from two existing projects of AfriScout which, on the other hand, had already participated in the UX research process.
First round of usability testing: At this stage of the process, we test the very firstprototype with a small group of users by asking them to perform some tasks and observing the behavior of this group while interacting with the app.Moreover, based on the feedback provided, several changes have been made
to the design and functionality of the app.
Usability testing went into its second round as we tested the final version of the app with more users in a different location. We asked them to carry out a set of tasks, giving them scenarios to simulate real-world usage. Again, we observed behavior and gathered feedback on designs and functionality. Usability testing made it easy for us to identify various challenges in terms of usability and usefulness.These usability studies have pointed out different challenges concerning usability and usefulness that needed attention.
For example, the intuitive interface of the app was hard for users to master. Also, targeting another language, they found it difficult to enter data on the keyboard of a tablet. Generally speaking, the area was remote, and internet connectivity was a challenge. We managed to make some amendments to the
app based on user feedback, hence making it more friendly and effective tothe users.
Ideation
Made by People addressed the identified challenges through an ideation activity, which meant gaining multiple solutions.Ideation took place through brainstorming, sketching, and prototyping. The opinions of users themselves concerning possible solutions were also solicited by the team. The ideation brought many changes into the design of the App, and one such was the introduction of a feature in it that could
allow people to enter data into the app through voice commands. The interface for the app was also made simpler by the team for Armed with information from UX research, it was time to brainstorm ideas for the My Voice project.
This was where ideation came in. Ideation consisted first of the generation of a large number of ideas and then narrowing these down to the most promising. We held quite a few brainstorming sessions with the War Child team, discussing possible solutions and how to implement those.Identification of the user stories and use cases of the application was the first step. We then went on to create user personas,
which helped us get a better understanding of the needs and motivations that our target users have. This was able to help us generate a wide range of ideas for the app. Some of the ideas we came up with included:
- A tool of feedback that might be used for getting the feedback from children themselves about their experience in morechild-friendly spaces. The tool would not be complicated, so that even children with small literacy scores could handleworking with it.It should be instructive for community volunteers on how different violations of international humanitarian law can be identified and reported.
- An attendance register that could automatically capture data from child-friendly spaces.
- An SMS-based reporting system by enabling users to report via SMS any violations of international humanitarian law.
- It would be a kind of mobile application that enables him to report the violation of international humanitarian laws with the help of a smartphone.
- An interactive map that would depict the location of child-friendly spaces and information on what would be available in each space.
All these ideas, until this time, had been filtered on the basis of their viability and impact, besides ease of implementation.We, therefore, iterated the evaluation and selection process a number of times and narrowed down the final pool of most promising ideas which could be used to design the application.
Software Development
Usability testing was crucial for validating the platform's effectiveness and iteratively improving its design and functionality. Made by People conducted two rounds of usability testing in Malakal, South Sudan, involving participants from existing WarChild programs.
The first round focused on testing the initial prototype, while the second round evaluated the final version of the platform.It also involved the construction of the learning and feedback application and the management dashboard in the software development phase.
The app was developed in Android using Java and XML, while the management dashboard was
developed using Laravel, HTML5, and Javascript. We also deployed the app on Amazon Web Services and used MySQL as the database.
During the development, we kept focusing on the goal of making an application user-friendly, even for users with low levels of literacy. In doing so, we try to make this app as user-friendly as possible by visual aids, audio at appropriate points, and using simple languages. We made the app lightweight, and thus it can run on even low-end Android devices.
Conclusively, the "My Voice" project for War Child Holland in South Sudan perfectly exemplified how a design-led approach to software development can make successively large impacts among the concerned communities. Putting the end-users at the center of the design process had clear outcomes: an easy-to-use platform that mitigates some of the challenges related to low
literacy and language barriers.
It also pointed out how UX research and usability testing play a vital role in software development. Through on-site research among target users and continuous testing of the product, usability challenges were spotted right at the outset, which led to receiving a worthwhile and usable product. The people's expertise in software development, UX research, usability testing, and ideation has empowered us to provide value with impactful solutions to a wide range of industries, including international development.
We are proud to have been part of War Child Holland in their effort to improve feedback and learning for war-affected children of South Sudan and look forward to the possibility of
continuing to positively impact those communities it serves.
