Through UX design, we have tools to strengthen our approaches to International Development, greater opportunities to meet real needs, and powerful opportunities to help facilitate social change.
So, what’s UX design?
User Experience (UX) is about centering design processes for new solutions around the stakeholders who will be using and benefitting from them. UX Mastery talk about UX design as “enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the user and the product”.
UX techniques include: stakeholder and user interviews (understanding needs); surveys; user testing; content audits; storyboards (capturing user interaction); persona development (identifying user groups); scenarios (understanding how the product may be used in people’s lives); wireframes and prototyping (layout drafting); and A/B testing (testing different design options or solutions with users).
Although UX design is generally used in relation to the development of technological solutions, UX principles and processes can be – and often are – applied to broader contexts.
UX design gives us the opportunity to seek a balance between the needs of different stakeholders. It is also seeing businesses and organisations shift their attitudes towards design. As Forbes highlights, Thomas J. Watson (the second president of IBM) once famously noted that “good design is good business”.
How does this relate to International Development?
UX design principles are already being deployed in some international development programs, but the potential has hardly been realised. As put by Gina Assaf and Tania Lee, “A human-centered design process is a critical step that is often overlooked when making important decisions in technology for development.”
Donors and managing contractors in International Development too frequently place more time and resources into achieving the objectives they have for a product, initiative or solution rather than thinking about the real needs of the user first.
This emphasis on the product rather the user creates indirect links between donors and beneficiaries. Unfortunately, as put by Frank Chimero, “people ignore design that ignores people”.
Graphic: Quote from Frank Chimero. ©Imcites
Assaf and Lee use examples to demonstrate – funding a product that requires high bandwidth for a community with low internet connectivity or a mobile banking app with a large amount of text in a developing context where literacy rates are low – product designs that ignore the very communities we work with are easily ignored.
Participatory development – where communities are empowered to drive their own development – continues to be highly important to International Development work, despite the fact that it is too frequently overlooked.
With UX design, we have the tools and capabilities to strengthen participatory development. UX design techniques and tools give us powerful opportunities to help facilitate social change.
Considering all stakeholders is a vital process in UX design, as is designing with the user.
Assaf presented at last year’s UX DC Conference on UX applications in International Development. As part of this, she spoke about her work with a community Honduras where she worked alongside local counterparts to look at how a computer lab could better serve their needs. She is a strong advocate for UX in International Development and commented on how the process in Honduras was a community effort, “Partnering with people from the community helps you understand more about their context, helps you come up with questions, gives you insights, and helps with training them how to work with you to design solutions”.
Assaf summarises, “The bottom line–you have to assume that you don’t have the answers and you have to partner with people who do have the qualitative information you need.”
As put by UX designer Rachel Grossman, “when we begin our work with the user guiding our process, we are working with people for the change they want”. After all, what is more important than properly addressing the needs of the very communities we are working for and with?
Image: ©Jami Tarris/GettyImages
Further Reading and Resources
G Assaf, How User Experience Design Can Impact International Aid, UX DC Conference, November 2015
A Kucheriavy, Good UX Is Good Business: How To Reap Its Benefits, Forbes Technology Council, November 2015
T Lee & G Assaf, What human-centered design can do for international development, Caktus Group, November 2015
UX Mastery, What the #$%@ is UX Design? (youtube), August 2012