IN A NUTSHELL

Girl Effect are an innovative non-profit that use media and mobile technology to help girls in developing countries who are marginalised, vulnerable and unable to break the cycle of poverty.

When they approached Beyond in 2015 they were struggling to track, capture and share project learnings and document institutional knowledge. This problem was compounded because at any one time they had multiple projects running in each of their offices in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Nigeria and London. What’s more, their staff turnover rate was high and project leaders were leaving the organisation without sharing insights they’d learned during their time at the company.

As one executive put it, “We are an R&D organisation but we are not capturing our knowledge. We repeat mistakes and miss opportunities to replicate successes. We leave ourselves open to criticism as we spend taxpayers money and charitable donations far less efficiently than we could.”

Beyond won a competitive pitch to fly out to each of Girl Effect’s offices, document the needs and pain points experienced by workers on the ground and then design and build a customised intranet. Our goal was to enable increased learning, efficiency and a sense of connectedness throughout the whole organisation.

DEFINING THE PROBLEM: THE DISCOVERY PHASE

Our research goals were to understand:

• Who are users were

• What a working day looks like for each key role

• Why existing systems/ processes/ tools were failing

• Why previous attempts to implement solutions had failed

• What kind of information/ tools staff handle

• What our solution would need to support (in terms of integration with tech/ processes, etc)

• What other factors are affecting the organisation e.g. culture, process, technology

• How users described the current and ideal state in relation to communication & collaboration

• How needs differed between locations

• How better tools could benefit the organisation e.g. efficiency & ROI

Part 1: Mapping needs and pain points

To build empathy with our users we travelled to and embedded in each of Girl Effects offices in Nigeria, Rwanda, Ethiopia and London. In total, we conducted 53 in-depth one on one interviews and 6 open feedback, co-creation group sessions with a total of 61 participants. We wanted to gather as many perspectives, needs and pain points as possible from as wide a user base as possible. We ensured we included a balanced representation of employees from different job titles, seniority levels, departments, genders and time served at Girl Effect.

One On One Interviews

This was a chance for key workers in each office to give a honest and confidential overview of some of the key issues around knowledge management at Girl Effect. Through these 53 interviews we started to map key themes that were recurring and add meat to our research goals. The confidential nature allowed interviewees to feel safe discussing some of the sensitive cultural issues as well as the process and system failings that were inhibiting the flow of knowledge around the organisation.

Co-creation group sessions

We followed the interviews with 6 co-creation group sessions. This allowed a further 61 members of Girl Effect’s staff to be involved in the needs gathering and possible feature ideas.

In the first half of these sessions we presented the key themes from the one on one interviews and asked the group to discuss, enrich and add new pain points to our existing collection.

In the second half of the session we mapped some possible solutions to the key pain points identified. Then we guided participants through a card sorting exercise where they sorted content / features / functionality that their ideal solution could have.

Part 2: Synthesising raw findings into actionable insights

We analysed all the interview transcripts and notes, extracting common needs and pain points. We then grouped them into key themes and sub-themes.

Research themes we identified:

• There aren't templates and processes in place to systematically capture knowledge during key projects and tasks

• Employees aren't incentivised to capture knowledge after a project is complete

• The lack of key technical infrastructure means knowledge can’t be shared across offices

• The lack of a consistent filing process means expensive research is often lost and then needs to be done again

• Employees focus more on sharing knowledge within their team and office than between offices

• Legacy knowledge isn't captured when staff leave the company

• With high turnover it’s difficult for employees to find colleagues in other parts of the organisation who might have the expertise to advise them on projects

Key product requirements identified through research:

• File management: version control/ edit control

• Document approval/ sign-off management

• Individual/ team/ organisation wide shared calendars

• Staff profiles with names, photos, role info/ bio, Skype username

• Cloud-based file collaboration tools (e.g. google docs)

We also defined key systems principles which reminded us of the creative culture we had identified within the organisation that we wanted to design for. Many of the employees had backgrounds in marketing and advertising and would be more motivated to engage with a system that was 'beautifully on brand’, ‘fun and delightfully simple’ and ‘inspirational’.

CREATING THE SOLUTION

Phase 1: Building a business case for investment into a solution and gaining buy in from the CEO & Senior Stakeholders

Our proposed vision for the user experience

In order to unlock further budget for the design and build phase of this project we had to present a business case to Girl Effect’s CEO and key stakeholders. We needed to present a prototype user experience that clearly met the needs and pain points identified during the discovery phase. 

We did this by designing a concept product and then mapping key quotes from our interviews onto the key features to rationalise our design decisions and prove their value to Girl Effect’s staff.

Our proposed technical platform

We also needed to show the rationale for the underlying technology we were proposing to use. We knew that building a totally custom solution was out of budget so we evaluated over 30 off the shelf products (and multiple combinations of those products) against the needs and technical limitations we had identified in the discovery phase. 

Products were rated for:

• Their feature offering (against our requirements list)

• How well they aligned with our system principles

• Integration with existing Girl Effect platforms (e.g. salesforce)

• External implementation costs (3rd party costs to implement)

• Ongoing costs per year (e.g. maintenance/ licence costs)

• Internal implementation effort (the level of effort to rollout within the organisation e.g. system/ content migration requirements)

We documented our product research and evaluation in a spreadsheet . 

We also evaluated each solution against a set of system principles that we felt were important to the staff and organisation. Additionally we rated solutions for their ability to integrate with existing platforms, costs - one off and ongoing (hidden) and internal implementation effort. This allowed us to evaluate each solution thoroughly and put ballpark costs to each option.

The solution that best met the organisations various needs, as well as being the most logical option in terms of costs - one off and ongoing was:

• Google Apps For Work (GAFW) (Gmail, Drive, Docs, Calendar, etc)

• Papyrs - an off-the-shelf intranet plugin (that integrates with Google Apps For Work)

• A customised ‘homepage’ dashboard built by Beyond that would act as a branded entry point to the system and as easy way to get an overview of key knowledge

• Powerful integration with intranet products, other platforms & extensions

• Powerful mobile apps for a range of devices

• Offline functionality

• No licence/ subscription cost for nonprofits

• Free ongoing maintenance and product updates

Identifying dependencies for success

A key element of our successful pitch to the CEO was the understanding we had of the organisation’s cultural issues from our discovery work. We mapped out some key recommendations that went beyond the remit of our work but that would have a massive impact on the success of the platform we were designing. We suggested that:

• The organisation needed their own head of I.T. rather than outsourcing this role

• Senior management must champion and advocate the solution

• Use simplified, unified consistent naming for teams across the organisation

• Create more events where  for intra-team & intra-country communication could be shared on a weekly basis over a video call

• Implement an employee exit process which ensures effective knowledge capture and handover

• Make leaders in each team responsible for managing their teams’ information

Phase 2: Securing Investment and ideating a solution

The CEO and senior management approved our proposal and so we moved into a 2 week design sprint. 

The key custom element which was the vital entry point into the system for the end user was the dashboard. The UX and design team started drafting epics, user stories and acceptance criteria for the key user groups identified in the discovery phase (standard users, Girl Effect admins/ content managers and system administrators.)

Meanwhile the tech team were investigating Papyrs and Google Apps For Work to enable them to determine flexibility & customisability. Their priority was investigating the APIs between the 2 products - as theses would determine which data-points we had at our disposal and be the main constraint on the experience.

We ran collaborative sessions with a visual designer and frontend developer and used diverge/ converge techniques to generate and refine the designs. Over the few days that we were sketching, the tech team were getting to grips with the APIs and were able to give me more guidance around the feasibility of the features/ functionality being proposed.

At the end of the first sprint we met with the client where we presented the findings from our tech/ API investigation. We also got their buy in and feedback on the dashboard sketches. 

From there we could create more detailed wireframes for the Dashboard. We went through several iterations, experimenting with different layouts and arrangements of the content and got feedback from the rest of the team before settling on the design below which aligned best with the mental model of information that users had created in the co-creation sessions I ran.

The card sorting exercise we’d done with the Girl Effect teams during the discovery phase gave us a an understanding of the most intuitive way to set up the information/ taxonomy architecture. We created a first draft overview, qualified it with the client and the shared it with the tech rteam

Phase 3: Building iteratively with users

With a tight budget and timescale we adopted a waterfall approach to project managing this brief. We still integrated a test and learn approach to remain flexible enough to make adjustments as the tech team discovered the platform's capabilities through the build.  

Another challenge was that Girl Effect had a major rebrand during the build. Their branding agency hadn’t explored the look and feel of the new brand on digital platforms. It was up to us to adjust some of our original designs and further adapt the new brand to integrate nicely with this platform across multiple devices. 

We created a core group of influencers and champions with Girl Effect who we used to test versions of the product. They were key in helping us iterate and validate elements of the design across the remaining sprints with real user feedback.