Context: MRIIDS – Mapping the Risk of International Infectious Disease Spread – was a USAID-funded Grand Challenge project with an ambitious goal: use global data to predict, in real time, when a deadly disease like Ebola might cross borders. Built in the aftermath of the Ebola pandemic, which left scars across all of West Africa, MRIIDS was intended to promote collaboration across countries so that they could work together to stop disease. A consortium of organizations had won the funding and needed design support as they moved toward piloting in West Africa.

Year: 2017

What I Did: My colleague Mehera O’Brien and I were brought in through Dalberg Design as the designated design team for the Grand Challenge winners. We started with landscape research and interviews with a variety of stakeholders across the global epidemiology space, ultimately selecting Sierra Leone and Senegal as our two pilot countries. Each representing a very different level of institutional capacity and response during the Ebola crisis, and we wanted the tool to work across multiple contexts. We then built prototypes of what the tool could look like based on the consortium’s plans, then spent three weeks in-country with government agencies, NGOs, and private sector organizations, testing our assumptions and refining the tool’s audience, algorithm inputs, UX, and UI.

What We Made: Our core finding was a difficult but necessary truth: the lack of complete, timely health data in West Africa was the single biggest obstacle facing this tool. Without a novel data source, accurate predictions weren’t possible with what they had. We delivered that finding honestly, alongside a set of concrete recommendations for alternative data sources and a design reframe of the platform as a data visualization tool which, our research showed, was something the target audience genuinely needed and would use. The MRIIDS team valued the work enough to request a follow-up engagement in 2018. Mehera and I were both unavailable at that time, but the Dalberg Design team continued supporting them with both of us in advisory roles.