Connecting Organizations to Gender Equality Initiatives Through an Interactive Planning Tool

Engendering Industries

Overview

Engendering Industries is a USAID program that helps businesses in male-dominated industries adopt gender equality initiatives. This helps women get promoted at the same rate as men and has shown to improve business performance.
The Best Practices Framework (BPF) was a long PDF of all the resources, references, and initiatives. In 2022, we transformed the BPF into a product that makes implementing gender equality initiatives and involving their employees easy.

Goal

Engage more users with initiatives and Engendering Industries' resources.

Impact

More users were engaging with the BPF as only 1,200 users viewed the original PDF. Mobomo was awarded additional funding to add more features to the BPF after stakeholders saw the launch as a success.

Through interviews, we found the digital BPF helped users find specific practices faster. Unanimously, people preferred the digital BPF over the PDF.

The Problem

The resource saw less than 4,000 views in the last year; a stark number compared to how many partners and people it ultimately touched (98 organizations globally). Leading weekly discovery sessions and gathering sessions with 2 key stakeholders, the Director of Communication and the Web/Digital Media Specialist, we identified these primary issues:

No Organization

There wasn’t a way for businesses to organize the initiatives they wanted to focus on.

Not Reaching Employees

Managers had to create separate resources to distribute information on initiatives so that employees were aware and involved.

We knew we needed something easy to share, access, and use.

Goals

By recreating the BPF as a shareable resource for employees and a tool for managers to create initiative plans, we will have addressed the main concerns with the PDF and invited new customers to an easy to use BPF.

Design Solutions

Improving the Exploration Experience

The BPF was a long excel list that users were having a hard time scrolling through practices. Not only did we hear frustrations of searching forever to find a specific practice, it was hard to share sections, too. By looking over existing digital frameworks, breaking the BPF into three separate page levels, Home > Phases > Practices, would be the best way for users to share initiatives.

If we place each practice on its own page, users can explore and link naturally.

Categorizing a Navigation Menu for Users

By organizing the BPF into a three levels, users can:

Quickly navigate to a section they are looking for, like a library.
Easily explore sections of the Best Practices Framework.
Do not feel overwhelmed by too much content on a single page.
Share individual initiatives throughout their network.

Easier to Identify, Scan and Navigate

Another problem users had involved not being able to differentiate sections from one another. People we interviewed quickly got lost and were reading more than scanning when trying to navigate an initiative.

Stakeholders needed the digital tool to have branding, and we took this as an opportunity for navigation.

Each Phase was color coded and given an icon which allowed users to continuously build a mental site map.

I proposed three different layouts along with details of each, with the block design ultimately addressing the navigation issues the best.

Planning Initiatives to Current and New Customers

Users looked for ways to interact with the framework on an individual level. We introduced the idea of letting users favorite Practices. To make sure this design pattern was understood by a wide audience, I took inspiration from Pinterest's Pins feature, and Instagram's Bookmarking Posts feature.

Users wanted to create initiative plans of the practices important to them.

Along with Nielsen's 7th heuristic to make the site flexible for a diverse group, the site now gives users a new way to individualize the BPF experience.
Users found the feature easy to use overall, but struggled with onboarding. We created a Rapid Assessment users take that will populate My Plan with recommended practices to implement. This helps users start to use the planning feature and become familiar with its purpose.

Reflection

My key takeaways were:

Presentation and communication are just as integral as mockups.
Fellow designers and stakeholders are invaluable resources for support.
Comprehending the resource’s content is necessary when attempting to improve it.

The project pushes the BPF's and its goal of improving gender equality into a more accessible and engaging format. I received support and guidance from my Creative Director, CEO, Director of Project Management, and the primary stakeholders. I took on many unfamiliar challenges in this project am thankful for my team and all the help I received!

ethanwatsonj88@gmail.com