Ushahidi

Unite Voices

Powerful platform that enables people to collect, visualize, and act on citizen-generated data to address critical issues in their communities.

Client

Ushahidi

Services

UX/UI Design Team Lead

Industry

Crowdsourcing

Date

2023

It all started with a vision — to build a space where authentic voices could be heard, free from the distortions of mainstream media. From uncovering election irregularities to mapping crisis response efforts and monitoring human rights violations, Ushahidi empowers people to crowdsource truth, share real stories, and turn data into action

Interviews & Business requirements

I conducted in-depth interviews to understand business perspective and wrote down the project goals and potential pain points. The CEO emphasized growth, scalability, and outlined the problem they address with this project. The CX Team Leader highlighted user frustrations and common pain points. They also provided me with important technical knowledge — in 2022 Ushahidi migrated from the now-obsolete AngularJS framework to the more robust Angular 14. This transformation opened many roads for maintainability, usability, design, security, and overall user experience.

Challenges

The main user problems were weak internet connection, requiring lightweight interface with minimal data usage for fast loading time. Additionally, the users were working with older technology, so compatibility with outdated devices and browsers was essential. Finally, many users had limited technical knowledge, so the interface needed to be intuitive and easy to navigate, with clear instructions and support.

UX Audit

I conducted UX audit, which allowed me to analyze an interface in detail, identifying its strengths and weaknesses. This audit prepared the team for product modifications using a combination of cognitive walkthrough and heuristic analysis. I provided a prioritized list of recommendations based on severity, helping the team focus on the most critical improvements.

Audit Sample

Recommendations

Styleguide

I moved forward with creating a style guide to ensure consistency across the design. This step focused on defining typography, colors, icon style, illustration pack, aligning the visual language and brand identity with the product’s tone of voice. It will serve as a single source of truth for all future design decisions.

User flows

Next step in the design process was to create user flows for key paths. For creating a new survey, I mapped out steps from setup to publishing, ensuring a smooth customization process. Adding a new post required a clear content input, formatting options, and an easy publishing flow. For finding a post, I designed intuitive search and filtering to help users quickly locate relevant content. Finally, integrating data sources needed a guided setup with authentication, configuration, and real-time status checks.

See user flows

Design System

After establishing the style guide, I moved on to creating a comprehensive design system with full documentation. This included a library of reusable components, interaction guidelines, accessibility standards, and best practices. The documentation provided clear instructions on usage, ensuring consistency across the product while improving collaboration between designers and developers. By standardizing UI elements and interactions, the design system helped streamline the workflow, reduce inconsistencies, and support scalability as the product evolved.

User testing

After platform redesign, I conducted usability testing using the Useberry platform with an unmoderated remote testing approach. Respondents were selected from recent user databases or individually. The test included screen recordings, mouse movement tracking, and video enabled for a comprehensive analysis. Participants were asked to complete 7 tasks designed to evaluate assumptions and test the usability of key features on the web platform. Afterward, a Preference test was conducted, where participants selected their preferred version of the Data view. The final part of the testing involved a Questionnaire, where users answered six questions about aspects such as the visual design of the platform, the most and least difficult tasks, and overall improvement suggestions.

Report presentation

The organization is reshaping itself as a data company—shifting its core focus from just enabling crowdsourcing to empowering people through inclusive, truthful, and actionable data. During Kenya’s 2022 General Elections, Ushahidi deployed its Uchaguzi platform in partnership with 19 civil society organizations.

Milestone Moments

We managed to redesign the whole platform, taking care of improving usability and visuals. Ushahidi Platform is now refreshed with improved submissions features (e.g., adding images, embedding YouTube/Vimeo content, and a more polished interface). Moreover, we launched an enhanced mobile app — now available on both iOS and Android — with accessibility across 160+ countries and support for 40+ languages, aligning with their goal to “raise 20 million voices” by 2026.