About the project

Behind every public dashboard was a much larger system that city administrators used every day. This is where they were responsible for uploading datasets, reviewing indicators, updating information, and making sure everything stayed accurate.

As part of my work at the UN-Habitat's Quality of Life platform, my job was to create workflows for city administrators to manage their data. My goal was to make those workflows feel clear instead of stressful.

In order for the data on the Quality of Life platform to be live, cities around the world that has joined the Initiative are required to enter and maintain their data. Before the Innovation team was created, the UN have been working manually with cities to explain the process,collect the data, upload it via Excel files, check for errors, and manually updated on the platform. This administrative workflow is rarely exciting. They're full of forms, tables, permissions, and edge cases. Not to mention, it was also time-consuming and error-prone.

Before designing anything, I wanted to understand how people actually completed their work.

If I'm being honest, this design challenge was one of the most confusing projects I have worked on in a while. This huge process consisted of 3 main steps: Joining, Onboarding, and Implementing. All of which included multiple sub-steps and processes. I had to understand the entire workflow of how cities upload their data, how the UN-Habitat team reviews and approves the data, and how the data is then published on the platform. (Thank god for Connie, my designer coworker!)

Together, we broke each tasks into smaller steps. Clearly defining how each action affects the different stakeholders. This helped us identify where users were making unnecessary decisions or switching context too often.

Our city administrators are not always tech-savvy. Our North Star is to make their lives easier. We want to reduce the amount of time they spend on just understanding the process and the platform. This meant that we leveraged tech heavily in order to automate processes where possible.

For example, we created a form that collects the city's information which later is used to automatically populate fields in documents and emails. We also used automated emails to send reminders, confirm uploads, and more. The team also implemented a system that auto flags data that is missing or or might be incorrect, and prompts the user to correct it. This reduced a considerable amount of manual work for the UN team, meaning they are able to focus on verifying the data and approving the uploads.

After we have clearly understood the problem space, the existing workflow, and defined the design goals, let's look at how we implemented the solution.

Though challenging, this project was a great learning experience. It reinforced the importance of the Empathy step in the design process. I took my time to really understand the entire workflow of how cities upload their data, how the UN-Habitat team reviews and approves the data, and how the data is then published on the platform. This helped me design a solution that would help the city administrators to be more efficient and effective in their work.