USAID Agrilinks Discovery
Using participatory UX research and co-design to create better outcomes.
Agrilinks is a USAID knowledge-sharing platform focused on the agriculture sector. Our client wanted to make design and content management improvements for a key section of the site, and my project team needed to quickly understand the user challenges and design opportunities. I brought the team into discovery and fostered a shared understanding of the user challenges and design opportunities.
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Date: Nov 2020-Feb 2021
Client: USAID
Role: UX Researcher
Methods: Semi-structured interviews, coding, thematic analysis, facilitation; Miro, Airtable
User interviews to explore behaviors and challenges
I conducted 15 user and stakeholder interviews to understand the challenges with the current experience, and the context surrounding the platform. I tried to engage the project team to take notes and observe in these interviews so they could build empathy with the audience. I combined coding and thematic analysis to distill findings into themes.
As I was learning about the subject domain prior to conducting interviews, I kept a list of domain concepts that I thought would help me with coding later.
Capturing notes by hand and reviewing those notes during analysis helps me immerse in the data.
I captured raw interview findings in Airtable and did a basic coding to make affinity mapping more manageable.
As I moved through affinity mapping, some themes began to emerge, and I used those themes to organize more detailed findings.
Transferring knowledge to the project team through facilitation
Once I had done initial analysis and grouped findings by theme, I began to share findings with the project team during weekly sessions. We would pick a research theme, review the main findings, and discuss and add new ideas. These sessions enabled the team to layer their own experiences and customer interactions onto the findings, resulting in a fuller picture of the problem space. As we grounded in the problem space, we also brainstormed ideas as a group, which we ultimately prioritized and captured in a product backlog.
Miro frames showing, by theme, the observations, synthesized problem insights, and how-might-we ideas to improve the content management experience.
Even though I focused the team on the broader how-might-we ideation, they often had ideas for straightforward changes to improve the user experience.
Once we had some ideas from the team and end users, I helped to prioritize and refine those ideas.
Co-design brings users into solutioning
One of the client’s goals was to bring end users into the design process as collaborators. We picked a small group of “power users” to work with throughout the discovery process. In addition to interviewing them, I facilitated a 90-minute workshop with these users to review the aggregated interview findings, confirm the main challenges, and explore design ideas from comparator sites. I conducted a similar workshop with the project team so we could compare their ideas with the end users’ ideas.
The Miro frames for the workshop. We reviewed research findings, prioritized them, and explored design ideas.
“Andrew took ownership of the discovery and co-design process: scripting and conducting stakeholder interviews, organizing workshops with target users, and facilitating team design sprints to translate insights into feature sets.”
— Agrilinks Product Manager
Leaving the team in good shape to improve the content manager experience
By the time I left the project the team had a good sense of the user challenges, and had generated numerous design opportunities to address those challenges. Together we prioritized those design opportunities, and the UX Designer gained enough direction to begin prototyping. I documented the high-level research findings, user quotes, and design priorities in a discovery brief.