Sustainable Development Goals

Support for national governments, and others to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Overview

A series of three tools that support physical infrastructure activities in their attempt to deliver on Sustainable Development Goals reimplemented and combined into a suite with shared membership.

As part of the project a portable UX lab was constructed on an aggressively small budget. The lab was used to test the usability of the tools and has provision for participant eye tracking using consumer-level gaming technology.

Designed in collaboration with UNOPS’s Strategic Initiatives team SustainABLE this was a challenging project to redesign and re-implement two existing web products and a highly complex Google Sheet as three web products that would comprise a suite. A key challenge was taking the stakeholders’ significant expertise in civil engineering and sustainability and a making this accessible to a wide audience with a broad range of skills and experience.

Purpose

The project delivered on a suite of three complimentary products that assist the end user in self-service assessing, supporting and funding infrastructure projects that have ambitions to contribute towards the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

Design

UNOPS user experience design philosophy is shaped by a heavy adoption of three key vendor ecosystems - Atlassian, Google and Salesforce. The conscious approach is one of reducing the perception of barriers between in-house products and vendor products. The consideration of which vendor design language (Atlassian, Lightning, Material) to adopt is based on the conceptual proximity of the in-house product to the vendor products. As Google’s Material has larger adoption, this is the default choice and was used as the basis for design decisions on this project.

Role

In this project I undertook the initial design work prior to onboarding a designer dedicated to the project. As part of the initial design key decisions were made - such as the adoption of the Material design language and the core goal of simplifying the experience for the end users. Following this I took on a design direction & mentorship role for the remainder of the project.

3 Tools

actionABLE

ActionABLE offers a reasonably basic take on an expert system that tailors a set of actions that can contribute towards achieving SDGs by asking the user to complete a questionnaire. It provides the user with a means to create and manage their assessment and supports exported action plans that provide concrete actions that can be taken to achieve SDGs and their targets.

Screenshot of a web application. — sustainABLE tool

Screen shot of a series of questions in a web application. — sustainABLE questions (design iteration)

A screenshot of questions in a web application. — sustainABLE questions (design final)

Screen shot of cards in a web application. — sustainABLE actions (design iteration)

A screen shot of the SDGs in a web application. — sustainABLE actions (design final)

enABLE

Screenshot of a form in a web application. — enABLE assessment management

A sunburst chart. — CAT-I (enABLE predecessor) analysis

A series of bars denoting amounts. — enABLE analysis

fundABLE

A screenshot of a form in a web application. — fundABLE filtering

Screenshot of a table in a web application. — fundABLE available funds

Wrap Up

The project leaned heavily into accessibility and usability, as part of the project the existing usability testing approach was augmented by the use of consumer grade / gaming eye tracking hardware and open source software. The feedback gained from this approach was incorporated into further iterations of the products and resulted in significant improvements. Accessibility was a key consideration for the project and at the time of deliver all key metrics were met.