PEACE CORPS NEEDED A SOLUTION

Each year more than 100 Peace Corps Volunteers contract malaria in Africa alone, often because they choose to not take their prophylactics. Sadly, in 2013 one Volunteer made this choice and died.

The Peace Corps asked us to create a mobile application MVP to help Volunteers maintain preventative strategies against contracting malaria.

mapping The Volunteer Journey

Over the course of 2.5 weeks, my team researched behavior change to help uncover Volunteers' motivation for not taking prophylactics.

We sketched out the journey of a typical Volunteer, from the moment she receives her invitation, through the completion of her service in country.

We identified three key phases that every Volunteer goes through:

discovering AN UNTAPPED OPPORTUNITY

We learned Volunteers have very little interaction with the Peace Corps during the Invitee phase, which is an untapped opportunity to convey the severity of malaria and the importance of prophylactic adherence, and to build Volunteers' trust in the Peace Corps.

Previous iterations of this app focused on reminder functionalities when Volunteers are already serving in country.

Our interviews with Volunteers showed that forgetting to take prophylactics isn't the issue. Not understanding that you can die from malaria is.

*Volunteer testimonials got us to the root of the problem.*

Ideating closely with the peace corps

We held participatory design studio sessions with our Peace Corps colleagues, which allowed us to ideate quickly and validate ideas on the spot.

*Participatory design with, from left, Peace Corps Fellow Courtney Clark, and teammates Alex, me, and Chris, all UX strategists*

Our ideation process brought out lots of wide ranging ideas to help with prophylactic adherence, from geofencing hotspots of malaria outbreaks, to interactive FAQs, and mobile phone cases that store prophylactics.

Distilling ideas into an actionable MVP plan

While ideation was fun, we had to distill our ideas down in order to fulfill our goal of creating an MVP to reduce the number of malaria cases among Volunteers. We zeroed in on the Invitee phase and got to work creating an interactive learning experience while Volunteers are still in the US, eager for information, and already glued to their mobile phones.

We conducted a design studio to collaboratively sketch ideas for screen flows and rapidly paper prototyped our way to designing the architecture of PC Prep Kit mobile app. We took inspiration from popular mobile games and best practices in gamification to really engage the Volunteers.

*Ideation led us down many paths and through many sketchbooks.*

Creating app Content

When it was time to divide and conquer, I took the lead on creating content for the activities we planned for the app, and collaborated on getting the designs into Sketch.

*Affinity mapping helped me prioritize the content needed. I validated these findings with Return Peace Corps Volunteers.*

Why Stop With the Invitees?

While narrowing the scope was important, I still felt that delivering an end-to-end solution would best tell the story of how this app could benefit Volunteers. I saw the opportunity to extend our deliverable into the Trainee and Volunteer phases as well. I took it upon myself to wireframe the key screens needed to close the loop of malaria prevention during the entire Volunteer journey.

*White board walls filled with our Volunteer Journey helped me plan out the ways the app can close the loop during service in country*

Prototyping an innovative concept

When the prototype came together in InVision, we completed a couple rounds of usability testing, made further changes, and arrived at the final prototype.

Download Spec Doc

Next Steps

The Peace Corps loved our solution, and asked us to commit our work to their GitHub repository so they could build out the content and developers could begin coding the app.

We believe once this MVP is fully built out with content and tested, it has the potential to be an effective platform for other Peace Corps and general health information.