UNICEF

Case Study

The Organization

UNICEF is one of the five core partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) working to eradicate polio from the three remaining countries in which it is endemic.

Besides their efforts.

Working alongside various NGOs and government. They track key indicators to monitor the eradication efforts in Nigeria, one of the three endemic countries (along with Pakistan and Afghanistan).

Innovation department to see how we could use technology to improve their efforts.

unicef helps fight polio
They track different indicators to guage their progress
Tracking was being handled by custom dashboard.

The Challenge

As the situation changed, so did the requirements and so did the needs of the dashboard.
I was brought on to help maintain this dashboard.
We were constantly wasting time clarifying requirements back and forth across time zones and spending a lot of development time on work that was outdated within a few weeks.
It quickly became clear that this would not scale

The Solution

My goal was to design something that would be powerful and simple enough to empower our end users to 'build' their own dashboards for any use case without any code.

My process on this project

Gain a deep understanding of the product, users, challenges and capabilities of the team to conceive of a solution.
- Meet all the stakeholders involved
- Talk with end-users
- Become acquainted with the backend and tech stack
- Become acquainted with and took ownership of the front-end
Identify any pain point and opportunities
Built a proof-of-concept prototype to get stakeholder buy-in
Get the prototype in front of end-users as soon as possible
Iterate based on user feedback and testing

Details

My approach was two-fold:

Visualize a dataset

Create a Chart Designer that could visualize almost any data fed into it in a variety of charts, tables and maps.

Examples

Track the trend of infection numbers with a line chart
Find the outbreak hotspots visually on a map

Save collections of visualizations

Create an interface that could combine these resulting Charts into custom dashboards that can be saved, modified and accessed in the future.

Results

The dashboard builder went into production usage in the field. After several months of iteration and support, the product was officially handed off to the local team in Afghanistan who now maintain it.