Opportunity: The Ebola epidemic of 2014 was a difficult experience for all the countries affected, but it also starkly highlighted gaps that exist in healthcare infrastructure in many places. In an effort to address these gaps, one of the winners of the 2015 USAID Grand Challenges – intended to fund projects to help prevent future epidemics – was mHero, a two-way health worker communication platform developed by IntraHealth and UNICEF. While the platform itself functioned well, the team behind mHero was struggling to find ways to make the product more usable and understandable for their user base. Our team was tasked with supporting mHero’s design strategy for use in post-Ebola Liberia.

Year: 2016

Role: Project co-lead

Process: After spending a significant amount of time conducting background and landscape research, including interviewing the creators and initial users of mHero, our team went to Monrovia, Liberia to host a kickoff visioning workshop with the Ministry of Health, as well as to spend time shadowing MoH staff and staff at rural clinics to better understand and integrate their context into mHero’s offerings. We quickly realized that mHero would need to be adapted in certain ways, as well as offer particular types of trainings, to fit Liberia’s context and synthesized our findings into a set of use cases and a set of design principles for mHero implementors to keep in mind.

Outputs: Our team submitted a meticulously crafted mHero Design Guide to USAID, which ultimately served as a base for mHero’s now-extensive respository of supporting documentation, which can be found here.