Post Distribution Monitoring

Mercy Corps responds to emergencies around the globe, helping communities recover from disaster and build resilience to future disaster. Most emergency responses involve humanitarian aid distributions in the form of cash, vouchers, food, or non-food items such as blankets and mosquito nets. Program staff conduct post distribution monitoring (PDM) surveys in order to understand the quality, efficacy, and utilization of the assistance, ensure accountability, and remove any obstacles to getting the right supplies to the right people, at the right time.

It can take weeks to analyze PDM survey results and implement improvements in response to the data. Mercy Corps partnered with Microsoft to develop a tool that automates PDM quantitative data analysis in order to dramatically speed up the process — potentially from weeks to days. I initially joined the project as a kind of human centered design coach during the early product strategy phase, and went on to serve as the team’s interaction designer.

Problem space

By the time I was invited to meet with PDM project team members, they had already done extensive user discovery and needs analysis. They had deep understanding of the problem space and a clear vision of what the PDM tool needed to do from a functional standpoint. They knew how data would flow through the system, and how it would be processed and stored. What was missing was a clear vision of the product from the end user perspective — what it would look like and how people would interact with it. I was asked if there were any techniques I could recommend, to translate their human centered design research into a human centered product design. Did I ever!

Conceptual design

My favorite power tool for synthesizing large volumes of information and distilling it into something I can work with, is a table of archetypal roles that will interact with the thing we’re building. It’s a great design technique for people who think they can’t draw, and I share it often with colleagues who design programs, trainings, and change management initiatives. I described the technique to the PDM team, shared examples, and coached them through the process of creating their own archetypal role table.

Every role has a column of essential goals, tasks, and content. Roles are not mutually exclusive; one person can embody different roles at different times. It’s a nerdy hybrid of approaches I absorbed from Alan Cooper’s personas and Constantine and Lockwood’s usage-centered task models. I set a few non-negotiable constraints: The roles have to fit on an 11x17 sheet of paper — no tiny type allowed. Roles do not equal job titles. Every goal must have at least one task supporting it, and every task must have at least one type of content supporting it. If your roles are starting to overlap, take a step back and find a more meaningful way of differentiating them.

With the PDM team’s role table in hand, I had what I needed to dive into interaction design. My next step is to translate the table into a task map that helps me see what needs to be on the screen and hear the conversation between the user and the system. The task map is also useful for differentiating critical features (color, solid lines) from those that can wait until later (grayscale, dashed lines.)

Interaction design

Unlike my role on Mercy Corps’ Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning platform, I would not be the nose-to-tail UX lead and product owner on this project. I was handing off interaction design to the technical program manager who would take the product through development. So I created a design wiki that was more detailed than it would have been, if I’d been the one writing acceptance criteria and filling up the project backlog. The wiki included user stories, annotated mockups, and interaction specifications — basic material for the project backlog.

There are only a handful of PDM advisors and data analysts serving a 5,000+ global organization with dozens of programs running concurrently and constant staff turnover as programs open and close. So this tool needed to be as self-service as possible. The landing page includes a small set of survey templates, report previews, detailed step-by-step instructions and contextual help to figure out which type of PDM survey best meets your program’s needs.

I use annotations to communicate system needs in addition to user needs. There was no dedicated visual designer on the project, so the mockups were fairly high fidelity, borrowing UI patterns from other projects I’d worked on at Mercy Corps. In the mockups below, I’m showing how one saves a report configuration to be run in the future after the PDM data is collected.

The PDM survey is conducted using an industry-standard mobile data collection application called Ona. Running a report initiates the process of importing and automatically analyzing the data.

In addition to designing for an MVP used for pilot projects with emergency response teams, I explored ideas for a post-MVP version of the tool that includes advance scheduling and collaboration features.

Project details

Role: Human centered design coach and interaction designer