New Story Charity
Problem
Operating across 4 countries in two continents, the house building charity finds it inefficient to communicate with local house builders and manage the progress of over 500 houses per year
Solution
We have built a mobile application to store all the information of a house in progress in a easily retrievable manner and facilitate communication between staff and local builders
Outcome
Staff and builder speeds up response time by 93% and the application is deployed to all our house builders in 5 countries and growing.
Mobile App Design
Duration: Dec 2016 - May 2017 | Team: 1 Product Manager, 1 Product Designer (Me), 3 Software Engineers | Contribution: Information Architecture, User Flow, Wireframe and Prototyping; Facilitated user research, feature design and handover
Feature Overview
Progress Overview
Builders and staff are able to easily monitor the progress of a house, a batch (collection of houses) and an entire community, and prioritize critical issues to communicate and solve.
Issues, Updates and Milestones
Hierarchy of messages from urgent to least urgent to respond, visually differentiated to categorize information about a house and prioritize messages to respond.
Object-oriented Design
Structuring all information by “objects” related to the real world objects (e.g houses, communities) and building reusable design “objects” so information is easily retrievable and speed up app development.
Research Insights
We have conducted multiple focus groups with our local partner managers and local builders in 4 countries, and our staff in the US HQ. The following 3 insights are the summary of over 15 focus groups we have conducted over the span of 3 weeks
Insight 1: Bottleneck in communications lies in lack of context
The original vision for the application is to be a customized messaging platform. But after interviewing our local builders, we realized that we all like chatting on WhatsApp. But the messages do not include contextual information, so there are a lot of back and forth just to understand each of the problems.
Insight 2: Not all information we store is relevant to the builders and local managers
Much information we have about a house is irrelevant to the builders, for example, info about the family which will live in the house). Local managers and builders also need to know different levels of information, for example, builders need to only know the info about the houses he/she is building, while local managers need to know info about the community as well.
Insight 3: Information overflow for both our staff and local managers
As our staff manages multiple countries, and our local managers oversee multiple communities in their countries, the amount of information becomes overwhelming. Oftentimes critical communications and decisions are delayed because messages are buried in emails, WhatsApps and spreadsheets.
Defining the experience
Based on the three major insights drawn from talking to over 20 builders across 4 countries where we were operating, we come to a conclusion that our inefficiencies in communication and managing operations lie in how information is managed and retrieved, and how communication items are prioritized based on their urgency to respond.
DESIGN CHALLENGE 1
Structuring massive amount of information
Each house we build has more than 150 pieces of information associated with it. To display all of them in one screen is impractical. Our builders also find it hard to find relevant information intuitively. Instead of designing what information will display in each view throughout the user flow, we opted for an object-oriented approach.
Before we started designing, we outlined the objects our builders interact with daily (houses, batches of houses, communities, families…) and laid out the information associated with it. Then we piled up with nest objects (e.g houses which are nested in communities), metadata and call to actions (things you can do with the object, e.g. mark complete for a house). Finally, we stripped the less useful information based on interviews with our builders.
Left: first outline of all information, call to actions, nested objects and metadata of each object (8 objects; 74 items); Right: stripped down version of objects and their information (3 objects; 14 items)
The result is, instead of confusing placement of information over different views, information is grouped together in “object views”, dashboards representing real world objects that builders interact with. Builders can easily navigate through the hierarchy of nested objects because they mimic the hierarchy of the real world (community > batches of houses > houses).
Objects naturally land themselves to views. Inside of views, there are “nested objects” (e.g. inside of communities, there are batches; inside of batches, there are houses)
DESIGN CHALLENGE 2
Prioritizing communications
The major bottleneck in our communications is lack of context. Information is buried in multiple sources, and time-sensitive information is not apparent for our staff or builders to act upon.
While an application centralizes information, without a system to prioritize display of information, our staff and builder still can’t act upon it. Based on interviews with builders and staff, we categorized three types of information exchanged frequently.
Updates
These are changes to the house/batch that requires attention from the builders and staff, but often do not require specific actions. (e.g. Construction halted due to bad weather)
Issues
These are concerns about the house/batch that needed actions by the builders and/or the staff (e.g. leakage in the exterior walls)
Milestone
Progress update for the house/batch. It also highlights the key stages of the house building process
The result is frequently requested or time-sensitive information comes to the foreground, while other information is pushed back to the background. Information is prioritized so that builders and staff are not overwhelmed by the amount of information of each house and community they deal with.
Outcome and Impact
From spreadsheets to a custom mobile application used by over 100 local builders across 5 countries, we have come a long way. Because of the application, we are able to streamline our communication and speed up response on key issues that delayed our house-building process.
Most importantly, we are able to deliver our homes faster to families who are living in tents and temporary housing. They can now live without fearing that their house would be destroyed.
1134
Houses built facilitate by this app
93%
Decrease in response time from our team
Feature Summary
Final Words
As I reflect on this design process, I realize the importance of focus and pre-design thinking. I can target at a more specific goal, then create more usable and fitting designs when I focus on a small group of users. The journey map, information architecture and object map consolidate all the components in the design and provide a clear picture to the final design.
Thank you Matt, our Head of Product, for giving me the opportunity to join this energetic team, and working with me on this massive project. Thank you Alexandria, our COO, for providing her operational wisdom and access to local partners, who gave us pivotal insights that guided this iteration.