Azim Premji Foundation: Research Portal

Requirements:

• The purpose of the portal could be seen as follows:
  • Be a repository of information, documents and resources of the Field
  • Provide a view into activities/engagements of the field institutions to all users
  • Provide a system to record and access information, logs, reports of all teachers
  • Granular Access Control to restrict content upload per location and role combination
  • Ability to search and access any of the above
  • User interface for both backend and frontend had to be simple and intuitive and minimalistic.
  • Input in 4 Languages – English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil.
  • Provide a means to do the above while on the move, which the current Microsoft Excel based systems don’t provide – a way to access via a mobile device and upload information on the go.
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  Outcome

  Design Thinking

  Portal’s primary users are field executives, who typically are not used to Digital way of doing things. Often overloaded with field work, we were cautious to make sure that portal didn’t feel like another thing to do or worse a hassle. It was important that the portal gets their buy in and they understand its utility, we employed design thinking process to understand user personas to come up with constraints and success criterias for the project. The process helped us to fine tune the backlog and visualise how features should work.

  Success Criterias:

  • Tackling Information overload -- It was important that field executives didn't feel overwhelmed by the data on the portal.
  • Mobile to be the primary device for the portal
  • CMS Experience should be extremely simple and pleasant to foster sharing.
  • Performance to be the key UX metric as most field executives are in Rural / Low network coverage.

  Dashboard Experience

  To tackle information overload, a location sensitive dashboard acts as a user’s home screen showing content ( reports / resources etc ) only relevant to user’s location, though a user in leadership role can change the location and zoom to country level to see what’s happening in the APF universe.

  Upload Experience

  

  To make sure there is a balance between adequate data captured and usability of forms, we conducted rigorous content structuring exercise vetted by field stakeholders. Also upload form UX / UI was given prominence.

  Mobile First Approach

  

  Most user’s primary device was smartphone and in many case the only device, It was clear from the start that Mobile first approach to Design and development is the only way forward. Given we were designing for a constrained real estate, it helped us immensely to remove clutter leading to better performance and user experience.

  Performance as the key UX Metric

  100% of traffic on the site is authenticated traffic and performance is critical for success of a portal like this, we achieved performance goals by:

  • Optimizing content structure and respectively the associated views
  • Frontend Performance -- Optimising Images, CSS Rendering and JS optimisations
  • Memcache for Views / Session and Data caching