CAMFED – Working with users to design an app to support major girls education initiative

Strategy

CAMFED (The Campaign for Female Education) catalyses the power of the most vulnerable girls and young women to create the future they imagine for themselves, for their communities, and for Africa.

We partnered with CAMFED on a project working with their community of educational mentors across five African countries to co-design a mobile app that supports their work delivering life and learning skills to female students.

Working with appropriate technology

Learner Guides are young women, previously supported by CAMFED, who return to their local school as mentors and role models. CAMFED had secured funding to develop a mobile platform to support the delivery of their work and we were brought in to carry out user research, run a co-design process and prototype the platform.

The programme operates in urban and rural areas. While Learner Guides had access to smartphones, connectivity was a key consideration as Internet access is often patchy. As such, the app needed to support offline activity and be as lightweight as possible. It was decided that a progressive web app (PWA) was the most suitable approach, allowing installation on users phones and utilising local storage.

Prototyping using an existing design system

We developed a set of visuals that showed all of the app’s features, including access to curriculum resources, user profiles and directory, learner group management, and evaluation data submission. The design applied the CAMFED brand to Google’s Material Design framework.

This enabled us to create accessible user-tested components that were familiar to the apps users, who will have experienced the interface on the Android operating system. We added interactivity to create clickable prototypes which were also tested with the Learner guides. The prototypes and a detailed specification were used to brief another partner that developed the platform. We supported them with additional input throughout the build.

Collaborative approach to user research

We involved Learner Guides throughout and used the project as an opportunity for them to learn about user-centred design. During initial conversations to develop and prioritise user stories, we partnered with staff from the national office to conduct interviews and workshops over Zoom and WhatsApp.

We worked with these colleagues throughout to communicate progress and elicit further feedback.