Mali Youth Participation – UX Research and Design
The Problem
In the West African country of Mali, youth ages 18 years or younger rarely participate in local politics. As a result, local politicians have nearly no feedback on how to make life better for young people.
The Solution
My organization was tasked to create an app that would allow jeune leaders (young leaders) to collect responses from local youth on issues that affect their lives. Each young leader would be responsible for surveying youth in 2-3 villages to find out what is they think needs to change. We’d then aggregate the results, produce a report and deliver the report to local politicians, who could use the results for new policies or communication campaigns. My job was to design the app.
Original Design Solution
After speaking to the youth leaders and seeing their headquarters through video calls, my design was simple: a checklist with a few built-in redundancies: home landing page, bottom nav, status summary before submitting. Everything was centered around a written report.
Concept Testing
I travelled to Ségou, Mali in late-2016 to test my design with the youth leaders. Most thought it was fine, but one young woman who had done surveying work for other projects had great insight. In French, she told me what roughly translated to,
“They speak in a way that justifies recording.”
In fact, the reason why WhatsApp is so popular in Africa is because it’s easy to leave voice notes. It doesn’t make sense to translate a local language into written words on a French keyboard. It’s easier to just record responses and transcribe later. Her insight made me completely change my design to center around voice.
New Design Results:
- Higher response rates
- More meaningful answers
- Fewer errors
