Digital Impact Alliance or DIAL, partnering with organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the United Nations Foundation, is dedicated to utilizing technology to help development practitioners across the globe achieve Sustainable Development Goals.  Currently offering access to a suite of open-source digital tools and applications, DIAL plans to roll out a new platform, “Playbooks”, that will ideally allow step-by-step guidance & instruction for completing field work and solving problems.  I was lucky enough to be part of a team that examined some specific areas that the Playbooks Platform functionality could be extended in a meaningful way

My team started by performing a Competitive Audit of various platforms that offered similar functionality to what DIAL was initially imagining for Playbooks, to see what the landscape looked like, which features & UI elements seemed to be commonly leveraged, and perhaps determine why that is. I contributed to determining and editing category names & comparative criteria, and specifically looked at the ATLASSIAN Team Playbooks. We then analyzed our findings as a group.

After a lengthy stakeholder interview, and further competitive research, I felt comfortable visualizing the current user experience in the form of a Journey Map- for both the Content Creators as well as the Content Consumers of the Playbooks platform, in order to further help identify opportunity areas for prototyping potential features.

Referencing the artifacts I created as well as the competitive audit my group created, I quickly identified a few areas that seemed most valuable to ideate further. Seeing how the user’s experience stretched out, from different perspectives, and how those experiences connect with DIAL’s goals as an organization, some potential feature concepts were clearly starting to take shape.

Utilizing an iPad + Apple pencil and Adobe design apps, I quickly mocked up ideas as they flowed. My teammates did the same (utilizing the tools of their choice) and soon after we regrouped, uploading all our concepts to an InVision Whiteboard. We then took turns presenting our prototypes to the Lead Software Engineer at DIAL, to understand the scope & viability of these features.

Having a better sense of the resources that would be required to implement any given feature from the scoping session we performed with the Lead Software Developer, we then utilized a Dot-Voting schema to narrow down which of our specific features we would further test the qualities of usability, desirability and satisfaction via the Kano Model.

With the results of the Kano Analysis informing which features are likely more meaningful, I then wire-framed those key features in Sketch App, and prepared a report to summarize my findings for the DIAL stakeholders, including annotations indicating where the recommendations fit into the Playbooks, with the goal of adding true value to their platform. I also updated the Journey Maps I had prepared earlier to include the more complete picture I now had of the overall experience, pinpointing where my design recommendations fit into that experience.

Working on this project was rewarding & inspiring. It sounds like adding the Playbooks platform and functionality to their tools, they could likely have an even greater impact on achieving their goals in sustainable development and solving complex problems in an ever-changing world. My hope is that in some way, the efforts of my team will offer some additional value to an already promising product. Something to note: My experience in this project inspired me to join Open Twin Cities (The local brigade of Code for America). There I’ve spent many free hours volunteering my time trying to solve problems in the the civic-tech space.

To learn more about Digital Impact Alliance please visit their website.