Humqadam - Gender Based Violence Resource App
An app designed to help Women Human Rights Defenders (and the general public) of Pakistan to respond to cases of gender-based violence. The app provides quick access to referral services, relevant laws, and a navigation guide for dealing with specific issues of violence.
Duration
1 year
January 2020 - February 2021
Responsibilities
Design lead
UX research, UX design, Testing, UI design, Training, Project Management
Team
3 members
1 Design lead, 1 Researcher, 1 Developer
The Grim Situation
Pakistan has frequently ranked abysmally low on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, and in 2021 ranked 153 out of 156, and cases of gender-based violence (GBV) against women are still on a continuous rise. GBV can include honor killing, rape, trafficking, physical abuse, forced marriage and sexual abuse. In the absence, or inadequacy, of the state, women’s organizations and Women/Human Rights Defenders (W/HRDs) have increasingly filled the gap in combating GBV.
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W/HRDs are on the front-line of human rights defense and therefore are exposed to danger themselves as they seek to protect victims of human rights violations. The various forms of violence HRDs might experience include harassment, torture, disappearances, and sometimes even murder.
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The lack of support, resources, and access to information results in W/HRDs working in the dark. They are often not aware of legal provisions and procedures that are essential to their work in supporting the survivors of GBV or other kinds of rights violations. Many work in isolation or as part of small local organizations with little awareness of larger support networks or organizations.
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Humqadam
Humqadam is a result of a collective effort for designing an application that can help Women Human Rights Defenders (and the general public) of Pakistan to respond to cases of gender-based violence. The app provides quick access to referral services, relevant laws, and a navigation guide for dealing with specific issues of violence.
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Design Process
As a design lead, I joined the project after initial problem identification was done by Shirkat Gah and Democratic Commission for Human Development (DCHD) by running KAP survey with around 900 participants.
My design process started with understanding what Shirkat Gah and DCHD aimed to do with the project and then building further upon it with my own research.
Requirements Gathering
In August 2019, the Shirkat Gah and TPI teams held a series of meetings to discuss the development of an application that would be used by human rights defenders in their work. Bearing in mind the very real and frequent threats to W/HRDs in Pakistan, the key priority for Shirkat Gah and DCHD in the development of an application to support human rights work in the country was the security of those who would be using the application. Previously there had been cases of W/HRDs being tracked via their mobile phones.
The second concern was to make the application usable even in regions with limited internet service. The project focused on 8 districts in Pakistan, and 4 of these 8 districts had low connectivity and low digital literacy rates. So the accessibility of the app became a concern.
User Research
No. of participants
15
9 women, 6 men
Method
Focus groups
3 focus groups with 5 participants each
Age Bracket
25 - 55
Research method and my responsibility
For user research, we divided 15 participants into groups of 5 and held 3 focus group sessions. These participants were mostly focal persons of each district, so they had a good understanding of their community. We decided to keep our sessions open-ended to see what emotions and narratives were evoked when participants had a chance to share their experiences and knowledge with each other.
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My responsibility was to act as a moderator in these focus sessions. Even though the discussion was kept open-ended, there was still a need for some constraints to guide the discussion forwards. A few things that we wanted our participants to touch upon were:
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Their experience as a W/HRD working in Pakistan
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The difficulties they faced while carrying out their job
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Their interaction with government and private parties while working on cases
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Use of technology in their daily routine (personal and professional)
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Use of technology by the communities in which they were based in
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Interaction of W/HRDs with each other and how they share knowledge with each other
Key Research Takeaways
After conducting focus groups, all the insights were divided according to the following themes: ​​
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Literacy: most of the W/HRDs were members of their local communities and had a low literacy rate
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Distrust of technology: there was a fear of digital solutions among W/HRDs because of how easy it was to track (according to them)
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Internet accessibility: the internet was not widely available in their areas and data packages were usually considered expensive
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Limited access to information: the laws around human rights violations are divided between federal and provincial laws. Not only that, each case has different nuances that change from district to district. There was no repository for these W/HRDs to refer to if they wanted to lodge a complaint or police report. Under such circumstances, the police were easily able to dismiss their cases
Some stories from W/HRDs
There was an attempt to throw acid on me after I intercepted a forced marriage
I once stopped a child marriage and my phone was tracked by the groom's family with the help of the local police
My father was wrongly jailed
Once a transgender woman came to me for help. She was being harassed by the village's feudal lord. I contacted the police and instead of helping, the police arrested the transgender woman under the false charges of stealing
I once gave shelter to a domestic violence victim at my home (which was a mistake). The husband of the woman tracked her down and threatened to kill me
User Stories
Before getting into the design of "Humqadam", I conducted a co-design session with all the stakeholders (Shirkat Gah, W/HRDs, DCHD, TPI) to generate user stories. The following user stories were formed:
Wireframes
Important note about wireframes
The wireframes were mid-fidelity and looked very similar to an actual app because the concept of a "prototype" was not readily understood by this user group. Since the goal was to run usability testing on these screens, to maintain a level of comfort, these prototypes were detailed and resembled an app
Considerations for wireframes
While designing the wireframes, I took into consideration the requirements of the user group. Some of these considerations are listed below:
Technical Design Considerations
Usability Testing*
No. of participants
25
14 women, 11 men
Method
Remote testing due to COVID'19
3 focus groups with 5 participants each
Responsibilities
Moderator
Also created testing questionnaire
*For the sake of keeping this case study concise, I have written the findings of all 3 usability sessions together.
Learnings from Testing
The following insights from usability testing informed the final design:​
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"Information by topic" was not a widely understood term
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There were constant questions about how secure the app is, and if it collects any data
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Participants found "Step-by-Step Guidance" questions confusing and something that they wanted to skip
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Users couldn't find the privacy policy of the app
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The "Relevant Law" section was the most clicked section during testing
Final UI
Features for "Humqadam":
Major laws/themes of Humqadam
Project Learnings
Importance of socio-cultural limitations during design
While designing the app, I had to keep in mind the security concerns that this user group could face due to the current conditions of W/HRDs in Pakistan. Security concerns led me to not include any feature that would require the user to give their details
Designing for older devices with limited capabilities
Most of the devices that this user group had used older android versions, and were usually slow. So the app could not have anything that would require significant power. This means it could not include any video, large pdf files, or images
Future-proofing the design
The number of scenarios and cases added to Humqadam do not cover all the women/human rights violations. The design of the app had to cater to all the different types of rights violations in future iterations so the design should have been flexible enough to cater to all the different types of cases