environmental and intl. development portfolio
designing a website for international development

Project in: Olin College Sustainable Design Lab in partnership with the U8 Global Student Partnership for Development Timeframe: Spring 2008 Location: Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Needham, MA (USA) Key competencies: User-oriented design, design for international development

The U8 Global Student Partnership for Development “Provides a neutral platform for students to learn, share ideas and make a positive impact on the least developed parts of the world.” (U8 Website) The U8 is currently looking into updating its website and better aligning it with its mission statement and long term goals. Specifically, the U8 strives to create a more “inclusive” website model that will be compelling and engaging for users from both the developed and the developing world. These requirements made for an extremely interesting design research project as the values and requirements of the two main user groups are seemingly opposing. In addition, it is difficult to think of whole global population segments as “user groups”, simply because of the variation that exists amongst the many users in both the developed and the developing world. We were able to make a number of generalizations within these segments, however, including the fact that users in developing countries will generally have less and slower access to the internet. The conflicting design requirements arise from the fact that these users still have needs for the content of a website and its presentation to be compelling and engaging. Often, engaging content presentation can be provided through a number of resource intensive web technologies, including Flash and JavaScript, which are usually not ideal for use with the infrastructure present in the developing world.

Therefore, a project partner in the Sustainable Design Lab and I decided to employ a number of primary and secondary sources to try and figure out some approaches to solving this problem. We realized early on that social networking models would be very appropriate for this kind of website, reducing the need for content generation from the U8 organization and creating an engaging model for all users. We proceeded to research more into social networks and also looked at a number of other international development related websites to get an idea for how they present content to their users.

The most exciting part of the project involved a user study of ten university students at Mzumbe University in Tanzania. We realized early on that it was difficult to make assumptions about users in the developing world, since we did not have a lot of experience regarding the use of the internet in these regions. More generally, we were also interested to see how these users obtained information and communicated on a day to day basis (important for considering the role of social networks) and about their general attitudes/opinions about international development. We established a relationship through the U8 with a student at the university who brought together the ten students for the study, distributed materials and sent them back to us for analysis. Each student was given a disposable camera and a journal book where we asked them to enter information relating to the photos they had taken of daily communication and obtaining of information.

Conducting this type of exercise was a new experience and marked the start of my interest in user-oriented design. We received advice from a number of professors at Olin on how to properly set up the study and how to ensure the information that was returned to us would be useful.

We have presented the U8 with summaries of what we learnt from our research and the user study, along with giving them some of our preliminary ideas for improving the online experience for their user groups in developing nations.

 

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