What is Health Access Connect?
Since August of 2015, HAC has been using motorcycle taxis to coordinate monthly, one-day health clinics to deliver healthcare to remote Ugandan villages. Their services include anti-retroviral treatment, maternal health services, malaria treatment, family planning, and basic pediatrics. Using loans and donor funding, they purchase motorcycles that serve three villages for every monthly mobile clinic and allow them to transfer nurses to secluded villages. When residents of these villages were polled, 74% of respondents listed the cost of transportation as the largest barrier as to why they could not access healthcare. The Ugandan communities gather allowances and set up a local location to transform into a clinic, giving nurses a private place to meet with the patients. The clinics are overseen by community members, who each pay $0.55 cents which accounts for transportation expenses. With a goal of maintaining sustainability and equity for marginalized communities, HAC wants to bridge the gap between access to health facilities and reliable transportation and eventually expand their model internationally.
HAC’s Design Challenges
Health Access Connect wanted to focus on three components to create a clearer narrative for donors and better storytell up:
- Create an accessible and digestible narrative
- Persuade grant institutions and individual audiences to donate while incentivizing partners to work with them
- Allow all different stakeholders to interact with HAC
Our Team
Our Process: UX Frame
We used the three parts of the UX frame to do a redesign of HAC’s website in order to meet their design challenges and goals.
[Experience Design] How can HAC best reach their audience?
Before we started discussing deliverables, we made sure to understand HAC’s mission and goals at hand. To do this, we recognized their major stakeholders.
HAC’s 3 Primary Audiences:
- Individual Donors: Primarily US-based and stemming from personal connections, individual donors are not stable or predictable as a source of revenue. To target this audience, HAC wants to communicate its mission in simpler terms, while adding a more personal element to create an emotional connection.
- Grant Institutions: HAC has increased reliance on grant-making institutions because they are stable in cash inflow and provide the bulk of funds. These philanthropic organizations are most interested in metrics — the competence and momentum of the organization is their greatest focus.
- Partners: Partners help engage academic research, scale HAC’s work, and replicate HAC’s model elsewhere. To partners, HAC needs to combine the personal and impact narrative while demonstrating its innovation and creativity.
“How can we help Health Access Connect build a more digestible and easily navigated website through storytelling, design, and communication to encourage donations and funding?”
With these three key audience groups, HAC needs to capture their stories, or even integrate them into one, on their website. Individual donors are likely to be directed to their site through social media; grant institutions will navigate to the site from the application materials submitted; and partners may seek out the site to learn more after interacting with HAC at conferences, networking events, or social media campaigns.
The slideshow below showcases a comic that was created to display stakeholder interactions:
[Information Architecture] How will we structure the information?
Deliverables:
Over the course of the semester, we used HAC’s current website platform, WordPress, to redesign their site along a clear narrative. We clarified HAC’s mission and the means by which it currently operates to achieve that mission. Along the way, we incorporated transmedia elements (image, video, infographic) to simultaneously make emotional impressions on individual donors, demonstrate impact and momentum to grant institutions, and highlight potential areas for collaboration with prospective partners.
We looked at several non-profit organization websites to draw inspiration for how to best form our own information architecture. Some of our goals included:
- Maintaining conciseness
- Impact with metrics
- Simplicity for user attention
We developed a card-sorting technique where we isolated key features of the HAC website and regrouped them to find patterns in our sorting. Within this process, we actively found ties between the card sort and the aspects of information architecture that were most impactful.
[Information Design] How will we design the website?
The media cascade we produced covered three areas:
- Beginning: Low Resolution and High Abstraction
- Looking at example websites
- Ideating changes
- Card-sorting
- Middle: Medium Resolution and Medium Abstraction
- Drawn sketches
- Wireframe drafts
- User flow
- End: High Resolution and Low Abstraction
- Report
- Pecha Kucha
- Info Comic
Evolution of Prototypes, Media Cascade:
Our Deliverables
Redesigning the Website
We used industry professional standards to completely redesign the website. The team immersed itself in Figma and built out final wireframes on the platform before transferring over HTML content to WordPress.
Figma Overview: We created five new pages
New Home Page
Why Health Access Page
Sharing Our Work
We created a final report to showcase our process, design journey, and work:
We made a PechaKucha to showcase our work on a high level and demonstrate the different core competencies of our team: