Designing a Learning Management System and Assessment Tool
UX Design with Elise West Design
Project Title: EQUIP (BETA; piloted in 10 countries) End Client: World Health Organization & UNICEF
264 million people experience depression globally, yet more than 80% of people in low and middle-income countries receive no treatment for mental health disorders.
Fortunately, those who have the appropriate training and supervision can play a role in alleviating this mental health crisis. The challenge then is in making sure that everyone does this safely and effectively.
What is EQUIP?
The EQUIP platform serves as a guide to a competency based training approach. The platform has two areas: an E-Learning environment and a digital competency assessment tool.
EQUIP is being piloted in 10 countries. The organizations currently involved in the pilot have been onboarded by the team but as EQUIP is due to launch as a globally available platform, the problem to solve is then:
How may we allow an EQUIP naive user to experience the benefits of the platform if they don't have the time or resources to commit to the full intervention?
the analysis phase revealed these as the problems-to-be-solved.
I joined the team when EQUIP was already in BETA. While the basic design of the Learning Management System had already been solved, the platform needed to be scalable to adapt to the many different organizations that might use it as well as account for edge cases of smaller (1-2 persons) orgs.
EQUIP has already addressed the following:
Has to be adaptable to any global language
Has to be able to handle the material and structure of different interventions
Must be able to give a fair, consistent and safe assessment to the helpers
Building a quick assessment tool that provided a glimpse into what EQUIP could do
Linking the learning management system with the assessment tool
EQUIP now has 1,500 active weekly users, and through them we found that the assessment tool was something that they used often. This project was unique from other UX projects in that there had already been a tremendous amount of research done, and so we had the opportunity to analyze the data in order to arrive at an evidence based design.
A quick sketch on the information hierarchy and the relationship between the LMS content and assessment tool
By offering the assessment tool as a Quick Assessment, we could give EQUIP naive users* a glimpse into the platform and to see for themselves how easy and useful having the assessment digitized would be for their own use.
*While these users are EQUIP naive, almost all users who will use EQUIP would have been exposed to competency based training which is the basic premise of the interventions on the platform.
The onboarding flow for the assessment tools (demo, quick assessment as well as the actual interventions)
By adding an onboarding flow in the form of 'tips', we were able to separate and further distinguish between DEMO, Quick Assessment and the actual live intervention program methat were on the EQUIP platform.
While these onboarding stickies are obvious to someone who is tech savvy, a large number of the users were not used to a digital product such as this.
The goal is for EQUIP to be freely available to organizations and users for a global, public good. This case study shows just one part of a large and complex platform that is continuously modified, tweaked and improved on.
