Connecting Organizations to Gender Equality Initiatives Through an Interactive Planning Tool
The Best Practices Framework is an interactive, online tool allowing 100+ global companies to curate best practices to fill gender equality gaps in the workplace identified by the Organizational Assessment and organized using My Plan.
Role
Research, Product Design
Duration
3 months
Overview
Engendering Industries is a USAID program that works with businesses in male-dominated industries to adopt gender equality initiatives. Their winning strategy fosters an environment where women can be hired, promoted, and retained just as often as their male counterparts.
The Best Practices Framework (BPF) was a long PDF of all the initiatives, references, and resources Engendering Industries created over time. In 2023, we transformed the BPF into a digital product and re-imagined how leadership create gender initiatives and put the plan into effect by sharing it with employees.
Impact
The individuals we interviewed were able to find specific practices faster and spend more time interacting with the Best Practices Framework. Leadership became able to discuss gender equality plans and share resources with the employees, a previously untapped user group.
Mobomo was awarded additional funding to add more features to the BPF after USAID leadership saw the launch as a success.
Unanimously, people preferred the digital BPF over the PDF.
Goal
Dynamically engage businesses with initiatives and Engendering Industries' resources.
The Problem
The resource saw less than 400 views in the last year; a stark number compared to how many partners and people it ultimately touched (98 organizations globally). Leading weekly discovery and requirement gathering sessions with 2 key stakeholders, the Director of Communication and the 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.
Design Solutions
MyPlan Planning Initiatives to Current and New Customers
Businesses 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.
Home – Top Level
Phase – Middle Level
Practice – Bottom Level
From the Home page, you can access all the phases, and from each phase, you can access its practice pages. This way, users:
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 resources throughout their network.
Iconography and Color Easier to Identify, Scan and Navigate
Differentiating sections from one another proved to be impossible. People we interviewed quickly got lost trying to scan when looking for an initiative.
Each Phase was color coded and given an icon to give users a sense of direction.
I proposed three different layouts along with details of each, with the block design ultimately addressing the navigation issues the best.
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 entirety of the client's team. I took on many unfamiliar challenges in this project and am thankful for all the help I received!