Steve Witmer: Crisis Tracker

The Story

Policy experts & non-profits wanted to easily view and analyze incident data for the crisis in Central Africa but were limited by unclear navigation, a poor user experience throughout, and antiquated filtering capabilities.

As a result, they were reluctant to rely on the app for their job, and they often felt frustrated when attempting to use the service to pull data or gain an insight.

ROLES:

project background

I worked for Invisible Children from 2010 - 2014 as a Graphic Designer and then as Lead UX Designer. Throughout my time there I gained a knowledge of the conflict area and developed a vested, passionate interest in the ways that technology and activism could effect change in the region.

Having designed the branding for the Crisis Tracker back in 2012, I was extremely excited when, five years later, I was contacted about an RFP to redesign the web application. I jumped on the opportunity to be considered.

With the help of a project manager to coordinate meetings & line up research subjects, I owned the design process from start to finish

Project scope & proposal submission
User research & analysis
Google analytic research & analysis
Presentation of research findings
Design sketching & concepting
Prototyping
UX Writing
Visual Design
Developer "handoff" & collaboration
QA process

I conducted user interviews to gather qualitative data about how the app was being used by the three key personas: policy experts, employees in the field, and office-based employees.

Primary Goals

Improve the information architecture of the home page & communicate the story better to users.
Improve the map view & the way incidents are displayed and interact with each other.
Give the daily power users better filtering tools to explore & analyze the data more effectively.

From interviews & survey results, I was able to synthesize the top concerns from active users. I did this primarily by using a digital card sorting method to cluster & identify common themes, quantify the results, and then identify opportunities that would have the greatest impact.

Mining the data for insights

It was clear from both the Google Analytic data AND the interviews, that the home page (map) should be replaced by a new & improved dashboard page - with a clear call to action to go explore the map.

“It was not clear what the homepage map was - and why I was landed there. I wanted to have obvious things that I could just click on to explore.“

Problems exposed by the analytics:

❌ 91% of visitors bounced within seconds of arrival
❌ The lack of a clear call-to-action contributed to the abnormally high bounce rate.
❌ Visitors were not seeing what they expected. Most clicked on the logo thinking they were on the wrong page.
❌ Visitors second click was consistently to the dashboard. That page had very healthy bounce rates, implying that visitors discovered what they were expecting in a home page.

Solving the navigation & dashboard issues

✅ Dashboard became the homepage. The logo now links to the dashboard.
✅ A clear description of the website was added front & center
✅ An obvious call to action to explore the map was added

Problems with the map view

❌ Users could not view list of incidents while exploring the map.
❌ No way to visually differentiate between different types of incidents on the map.
❌ Incidents list didn’t interact with the map in any meaningful way.

The Solutions

✅ Move the map to the background of the page and let the incidents scroll on top.
✅ Show different incident types with different colors, and allow users to toggle on/off incident types.
✅ When a user clicks on an incident, center the map on that incident and open an info popover.

The Results

Almost a full year after this redesign was launched, I analyzed the Google Analytics data to see how it was performing. Both the avg. bounce rate & avg. session duration have shown huge improvements.

Personal Takeaways

Building an RFP-like process into any project planning This was my first time submitting to a formal RFP process. Building out the proposal was a challenge for me, as it was not something I've done before. The benefit to going through this process was that I had an extremely clear understanding of the project goals & deliverables, as well as the project timeline. I would consider using an RFP format in the future for any project as an alignment tool. View RFP Submission

Crafting a research presentation sometimes IS the point This was the first project where I had to do a formal presentation of research findings, and I loved it. The process of crafting a presentation really helped me to internalize the insights pulled from user interviews and the analytics. If the project timeline allowed, I would aim to build this step into my future research & design workflow. View Research Presentation
Life isn't always pixel-perfect As a detail-oriented designer, it can be frustrating at times when the finished product doesn't reflect your "pixel-perfect" designs. But it's important to remember that not all projects budget in adequate space for this back and forth QA. I think I can do a better job mitigating this in the future by better communicating my expectations with the engineer(s) - in part by developing a more in-depth style & component guidelines as well as introducing some sort of design README document that lays out the areas I care the most about.

Cross-cultural user interviews Having the opportunity to conduct user interviews across different languages and continents helped improve the confidence I have in my interview skills. I've found I have a keen ability to put interviewees at ease quickly, allowing them to feel comfortable to open up about their problems & use cases in a natural way. I think this is one of my unique strengths as a designer, and I look forward to leaning more into this skillset in the future.

Mapping Violence in Central Africa