UAE PRIME MINISTERS OFFICE: POLICY TRACKER APP
JANUARY 2014
Project introduction
In October 2014 the EIU began development of an app for the UAE Prime Minister’s office to track key issues and policy developments across the world in seven key areas identified in the National Agenda. Ministers wanted to keep abreast of government policies in various fields from around the world, but did not have the time nor inclination to consume heavy, wordy presentations or documentation. Instead, we sought to leverage the Ministers’ preference for reading on and using tablet devices by creating an app that would make the consumption of policy documents a visually rich, engaging and interactive experience.
Audience
The app was targeted at senior leadership and Prime Minister's Office executives of the United Arab Emirates, these included Ministers, the Director General and policy experts. This was a really unusual project in that we were designing an app for a small audience, almost all of whom we knew by name.
In some respect this was great to be able to get so close to the actual users of the app, we could speak directly, show and test prototypes and garner feedback directly. But we were also wary that we needed to display design leadership and neither resort to design by committee nor blindly agree to all the client's requests.
Team and my role
The app was developed fully in-house by the EIU. We had 2 teams working on the project. On the content creation side we had a team of public policy experts who were writing the content and then on the product side we had a lead designer (myself), a visual designer, product lead, a single frontend and backend developer, and a project manager.
Constraints
The only significant constraint was the dispersed nature of the team. The client and a couple of members of the editorial team were located in the UAE, I was stationed in London along with the product owner, another member of the editorial team and our front end developer. Our visual designer and development team were in New York.
Opportunities for meeting were reduced, we had no face-to-face meetings we did everything by phone, IM or teleconferencing and the UAE has a slightly different workweek to the UK and the US meaning we lost one day a week. This kind of setup is not unusual when working on EIU projects, so we were able to minimise disruption, but it can still be challenging in terms of communication and keeping things moving. In particular demoing work in progress can be tricky, but I’ll explain below how we managed this.
Design process
Research phase/ Talking to the client
Our design process began with a research phase. We had a number of hour-long teleconference sessions with the Ministers, where we asked them to broadly talk about themselves, their roles and routines, how they normally consume policy information, how they use that information in their decision-making.
We then moved more specifically into the proposal for an app and how they saw this fitting into their current workflow and particularly exploring where it might add value. We talked quite generally about how technology is used in their lives, not just at work. We asked them to describe the kind of apps they use a lot and in particular we talked about reading habits on devices. We discovered that the app should serve as a reference tool to allow users to quickly identify pertinent issues and policy responses in their area of interest, but should also serve as an interesting, informative and easy-to-consume reading experience, for users who are not focussed on a specific policy area.
Research phase/ Digital magazines
When the Ministers were talking about preferred reading experiences they used words like ‘not too much text’, lots of graphs and charts, ‘interactive’, so I decided to explore magazine-style reading experiences. The policy content that the EIU was writing was also to be released on a monthly basis, so this also felt like issues of a magazine or newspaper and adding weight to this editorial style of delivery.
I began by thinking about magazines both in a print and a digital format and an obvious starting reference point was the Economist's own magazine. I downloaded copies of the Economist magazine onto an iPad and read these on my daily commute to gauge my own feelings for consuming magazine-style delivery on a device. I also starting covertly observing other commuters reading on their devices - how did they hold the device, what gestures did they use for page turning, were they interacting with the content or just reading, did they multi-task and so on.
I then looked for inspiration for examples of apps that I thought offered interesting and innovative reading experiences on devices one of which was Push Pop Press’s app for Al Gore’s Our Choice.
Sketching
When it came to the concepting phase I set up a number of sessions attended remotely by some of the PMO team to work on the overall flow, navigation and layout of the app. We started exploring ideas around traditional magazines including cover pages, contents listing, featured articles and editors notes page, but ended up developing an idea around something less conventional. This bento box layout as I described it, presented high level engaging snippets (quotes, graphics, video) as windows through which a user could deep dive into the content pages.
For the content page I was very much focussed on at least giving the perception of something visual with a low density of text. I worked with the editorial team who were writing the articles to establish a balance between text and visuals. We looked at ideas around having macro and micro stories, where the former might be the broader description of a policy in a country and the latter is overflow content positioned off canvas that the user could bring in to get further insight. At the same time we were wary that if we deemed that content is important for readers to see, then it shouldn’t be hidden and we backed off this idea.
In our discussions with the Ministers they often talked about interactivity and the promise of cool visuals is certainly seductive, but they can be an expensive mistake that do little to improve communication. We prototyped a number of different interactive charts that might let users change things like date ranges or selection of indicators, but after evaluating and sizing these with the development team and the client, it was decided that interactivity would be limited to tapping data points on charts to reveal actual values.
Once we had established the overall flow, organisation and page layouts, I worked with the editorial team to create an article template. This would ensure that all of the article pages would follow a similar format for all future editions.
Prototypes
Initial ideas were worked up into a higher fidelity and prototyped with Invision to give a feeling of the overall flow and movement of the app moving from entry point to content page, then pivoting to a new policy area. These were shared with internal stakeholders and the clients alike.
When presenting ideas to the client we used an EIU colleague stationed in the UAE to take an iPad with the demo into the meeting. I would first step through and describe the app via our conferencing system and then we would hand the tablet to the client for them to play with and get a real feeling for the experience.
We had several weeks and rounds of feedback, iteration and testing with the client before finalising the design.
Development
Because of commitments on other projects I was not able to be fully involved in the development cycle of the app. I handed off my deliverables to a visual designer and briefed the development team. I was only then able to attend the sprint review meetings, where I was able to see the development progress and to give feedback.
Retrospective and lessons learned
The app was launched successfully in February 2015, with great feedback from the client. After several months we were asked to create an Arabic language version of the app. We had initially scoped out this possibility early on in the project and so it was a relatively easy exercise to adapt the UI for RTL rendering.
For this project we were particularly close to the end users and because they were an easily identified group, to whom we had a lot of access, it was easy to increase their direct involvement. This bringing closer of the design team to the users provided us with insight into what is valuable for them, particularly important since they were from a different culture to our own. The idea of co-creation was a way to unleash the creative energy of a number of individuals and I found this to be an eye-opening approach to user research and design and I think the final product greatly benefitted from it.
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