ReliefWeb Case Study

When a disaster occurs anywhere in the world, the United Nations's ReliefWeb is the primary information resource for the humanitarian aid community. The information published there mobilizes real-time relief efforts, spurs non-governmental organizations (NGOs) into action, and affects how much funding governments provide to emergencies around the world. In 2002, the UN came to Adaptive Path to redesign this critical resource.

ReliefWeb Home Page

Overview

Working with the United Nations to improve the experience and function of a comprehensive information repository for the worldwide humanitarian aid community.

Industry

Global Non-Profit

Project

Website redesign and application design

Project Duration

Two years (Six months to design, 18 months to build)

Team Size

Two practitioners from Adaptive Path, and two from Mule Design

Services Applied

• Interaction design and development
• Meta-data driven information architecture
• User research and mental model
• User interface design
• Visual Design

Adaptive Path, working with Mule Design, restructured and redesigned the site, guiding an unfocused legacy site into the modern day. The project finished just as the 2004 tsunami hit Southeast Asia. ReliefWeb is the most radical before and after that any of our practitioners have experienced.

Background

ReliefWeb is, "the global hub for time-critical humanitarian information on complex emergencies and natural disasters."

It is an extraordinary information repository that keeps humanitarian aid workers apprised of the latest emergencies, so that aid gets where it needs to be quickly and efficiently. Each day, the ReliefWeb team publishes more than 200 documents from over 900 sources—including news organizations, academia, governments, and non-governmental organizations (like the World Health Organization). ReliefWeb users rely on the site to facilitate the life-or-death decisions they make daily.

But, while the site provided a wealth of information, it failed to provide context. Users were unable to find related resources or to see the overall story of an emergency.

Clarifying The Problem

Once Adaptive Path had done some discovery work in the sales process, we set out to further clarify the needs of site users. To do this, we:

Conducted stakeholder interviews. We spoke with everyone from the Undersecretary General to the html editors, asking each a set of questions about the business they were in. Why does it exist? Whom does it serve?

Though the UN already had some personas developed, we quickly realized that ReliefWeb had never done field research.

Because "context" is so essential to users' job function, and job function was critical to our mission, we expanded the scope of the project to include an original user research study that would help us understand how ReliefWeb supports humanitarian workers.

Instigated a user research study. Our field study included members of four primary audiences:

1. United Nations field workers, who are on site at an emergency, sometimes for years. They provide aid directly to affected populations, set up new project locations, and maintain regular contact with their partners in the regional office.
2. NGO field workers, who do similar work to UN field workers, but operate under a different umbrella organization.
3. Government officials, who work in a less hands-on capacity. They help resolve large-scale issues and make important budgetary decisions.
4. Desk officers, who coordinate activities within the UN as they apply to a specific country or emergency.

The most challenging aspect of these interviews was tracking down the people we most needed to contact, the field workers. Field workers are not necessarily near phones (or even in countries that have working phone systems), and are sometimes in dangerous situations that make it difficult to plan ahead.

Adaptive Path spoke to one field worker who said that when she arrived in a new town to set up an office, she had to go door to door to find out who had enough political control to rent her space. Another field worker answered our questions from a warehouse. She had locked herself inside to escape angry refugees, and was awaiting help. In all of the interviews, obtaining timely, credible information was users' number-one concern.

Articulating Objectives

Once we had a clear map of how users might ideally use the site, we found that we could also more succinctly articulate the ReliefWeb mission:

Identified a threefold mission. After reviewing Adaptive Path's data and discussing its implications, the UN outlined the three primary points of its mission:

1. Provide timely information about breaking and ongoing emergencies worldwide, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
2. Support professional development of individuals in the humanitarian community.
3. Create and maintain a comprehensive repository of information that could serve as a historical resource for all emergencies since 1996.

Established design goals and fixes. ReliefWeb's old design forced users to gather and group information themselves, one document at a time. We decided to:

• Speed information retrieval, as measured in clicks, by reorganizing the content according to user tasks.
• Provide context around each emergency by aggregating all types of information about a particular emergency into a single overview, or "hub" page.
• Eliminate site-wide information overload by offering filters that reduce long lists of information to specific subsets relevant to each individual's interest or job function.

These changes would drastically reduce the amount of time necessary for users to locate time- and mission-critical information.

Working With Our Clients

The United Nations had very specific needs as a client. Stakeholders were working from locations around the world, making decisions that could have dire consequences if anything went awry. We strived to accommodate the UN's unique needs by:

Managing international meetings. Because ReliefWeb managers are scattered around the globe, our meetings spanned continents, time zones, and date lines. The majority of project meetings took place via telephone, with participants in San Francisco; New York; Geneva, Switzerland; and Kobe, Japan. We rotated the times of these three-continent calls so that each participant had a chance to work during standard business hours.

Minimizing travel. Though the project was highly collaborative and unfolded over two years, budget constraints demanded that we minimize travel. UN and Adaptive Path team members met once in Milan for a two-day strategy session, where we reviewed wireframes and discussed new solutions to problems. The UN project lead traveled twice to San Francisco, while the Mule and Adaptive Path teams paid only one visit to New York. Overall, the project progressed efficiently via email, telephone, and instant messaging.

Accommodating a more cautious process. Of necessity, the UN is a profoundly deliberative organization. Stakes for this project were high—in fact, lives hung in the balance. We were proposing radical changes that were difficult to understand and accept, especially during the early conceptual phases of the project. The UN team needed time to facilitate discussion and provide feedback. We were able to accommodate that need.

Providing exhaustive deliverables. ReliefWeb is integral to worldwide humanitarian efforts, so there was little room for error. In recognition of the high-stakes nature of the work, we produced exacting wireframes that helped resolve detailed questions and made the UN team feel comfortable with the new design.

Problems And Solutions

Though the project scope was formidable, Adaptive Path worked through each obstacle in turn to produce drastic and demonstrably effective solutions. What follows is a sampling of the main obstacles Adaptive Path helped the UN to overcome:

Problem: Information overload

Though users had nowhere else to turn for the information ReliefWeb provided, it was time consuming and occasionally impossible to find what they needed.

ReliefWeb was using a Lotus Notes–style document-listing interface to display tens of thousands of documents. This was a nightmare for users. For example, to find an advisory from the World Health Organization, users had to scroll alphabetically, screen over screen, through 900 sources and 45 screens to reach "W."

Solution: Business rules

ReliefWeb has always been a dynamic, database-driven site. But without an understanding of how users needed the information, the site provided most listings by date, or alphabetically. Adaptive Path looked at the content available and wrote business rules to match user tasks that needed support. The new architecture is such that every part of every page is displaying a unique set of content as defined by user tasks.

Problem: Lack of career support for employees

When we started, professional development for humanitarian workers was a somewhat secondary priority. The UN team knew their Jobs Board was important—it had 45,000 subscribers—but they hadn't yet made it part of their core mission. Through the redesign process the UN decided that, in order to support humanitarian decision making, they had to support decision makers.

Solution: Made career support part of the core mission

We combined the jobs board with training offers and made them accessible from any of the hub pages. Vacancies and training opportunities are filtered by country and emergency, so people interested in working on a particular crisis can find openings immediately.

Problem: Complex finance structure.

User research helped us realize that requesting and locating funding for projects was a crucial and time-consuming task, especially for desk officers. Before the redesign, financial appeals and funding documentation were in separate sections. To get a complete view of an emergency's financial picture, users had to review two separate parts of the site, and each had its own architecture.

Solution: Group finance content.

The redesign substantially reduced the workload for desk officers and finance people by putting appeals and funding information in the same section, and providing common reference points. Now, within any given emergency, users can have a snapshot of the financial situation with a single click.

Problem: Widely dispersed information on each emergency.

Before the redesign, aid workers who needed to research a particular emergency or country had to compile the information by hand. Each subset of data was located in a different place on ReliefWeb.

For example, a field worker who had been assigned to an unfamiliar country would find that maps, emergency updates, information on who was already at work in the region, basic country data, and travel information were all listed on separate pages with no connecting structure. It could take days to assemble an accurate overview of a region.

Solution: Hub pages

Adaptive Path implemented "hub" pages that are now the entry points for each country or emergency. Every hub page offers:

• The five most recent news updates
• Updates for the sectors in which people work (security, water and sanitation, food distribution, and so on)
• Financial appeals and funding
• Maps
• Who is currently at work in a region
• A country profile
• Travel information for workers who need to reach a location
• Job vacancies
• Training opportunities

Problem: Discerning information quality

Because not all information sources are reliable, ReliefWeb users have to assess data with a critical eye. User interviews revealed that one of users' main tasks was evaluating information for validity, usually by examining the source of a publication.

In the old ReliefWeb interface, users would manually search for information pertinent to their assigned country or personal duties, then check the source and type of that information, and finally crosscheck with media reports.

Solution: Filters

Adaptive Path applied filters throughout the new ReliefWeb site. Users can now automatically filter any set of information to reflect responsibilities, country of interest, preferred content type, and preferred content provider. This system allows users to focus in on the right information quickly.

Mission Accomplished

Working with the United Nations was one of Adaptive Path's most arduous and rewarding projects. Our team was tasked with breaking down what seemed an insurmountable mass of information. Our experiences affirmed that if you start with human beings sharing their stories, they will tell you how to put that information into context.