Custom Design, Drupal Development and Maintenance for WHO’S Knowledge Action Portal
The Knowledge Action Portal on NCDs (KAP) is a knowledge sharing and community platform dedicated to enhancing NCD prevention and control through multisectoral and multistakeholder collaboration. The KAP is hosted by the World Health Organization’s Global Coordination Mechanism on the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases (GCM/NCD).
PROBLEM STATEMENT
The KAP was first launched in 2018 as a knowledge sharing and community platform for multistake holder collaboration. By 2022, the portal’s design, user-experience and technology had become outdated and presented multiple challenges to site users and the admin team at the WHO GCM/NCD. Nirvana Canada was tasked to help conceptualize, plan, design and implement the complete redesign and relaunch of the KAP, ensuring up-to-date data page technology, security and privacy standards, and a modern, user-friendly design to re-engage portal users and GCM Participants.
RESEARCH & DISCOVERY
Research and discovery for this project started with a detailed assessment of development needs and implementation plans with the client, who presented a draft development and engagement strategy for the KAP relaunch.
A detailed community report and a comprehensive UX/UI assessment had been conducted in 2020 and 2021 respectively. These directly informed the new development strategy and work-plan.
For the new portal design, page navigation and updated knowledge taxonomy, multiple rounds of user-testing helped fine tune key elements of the new portal. This helped validate design and UI elements, and led to implementing a substantially streamlined navigation and knowledge taxonomy.
20-30 years
found the website’s user interface dated and not engaging enough. It was a struggle for them to find relevant data and upload data that they uploaded in a well formatted manner.
30-40 years
found the website confusing. After logging in as a KAP user, their dashboards were not intuitive enough.
40-50 years
found the typography not web friendly enough and the colours jarring.
GOALS
Developing a revamped version of the KAP aimed both at modernizing the look and feel of the portal, as well as creating new engagement and contribution opportunities for its users and for GCM Participant organizations. The process hence also included redesigning and improving user log-on and profile features, options to join and manage private and public communities of practice, creating individual content collections, and submitting knowledge resources, news and country stories directly to the platform.
Together with the client, we used basic low-fi wire-framing and several iterations of draft designs to determine the new page look and key user functionality.
site map
We assessed the portal’s information architecture jointly with the client, and agreed on a streamlined content ‘hierarchy and navigation elements.
visual design
The portal’s original design was dark and dated. There was no effective way to structure content and the overall visual language and UI design on the platform was largely inconsistent. The page also presented multiple responsiveness issues, and did not display correctly on mobile devices.
We developed a new design:
- Offering a lighter, more contemporary look and feel.
- Introducing a distinctive content hierarchy.
- Transforming the side menu into an easy-to-navigate, horizontal mega menu.
- Deploying a full responsive page design with up-to-date technical standards.
- Incorporating a memorable layout for material and resources, including colour-coding and hero images for better user recollection.
- Redesigning user registration, log-on and content contribution features.
logo explorations
colour palette
- #8ab4ca
- #4b6377
- #d6980c
- #479fce
- #fff4dd
- #ddebf3
SECURITY
Since the platform offers user registration and hosts multiple resources from the client and partners, we ensured highest privacy and data security standards. This includes manual user verification by admins, as well as automated steps with integrated captcha and two-factor authentication.
DEVELOPMENT
Our development team worked to build this platform using HTML 5, Drupal, CSS3 and JAVASCRIPT. We worked with the pre-established data base built primarily in Drupal. Based on the information gathered during the discovery phase, our team created a custom website design that aligned with the customer’s needs. We used industry standard practices, ensuring responsive, cross-browser compatibility and optimal performance. Security.
Since the platform offers user registration and hosts multiple resources from the client and partners, we ensured highest privacy and data security standards. This includes manual user verification by admins, as well as automated steps with integrated captcha and two-factor authentication.
WHAT THE World Health Organization TEAM HAS TO SAY
