As a team, Ushahidi made the conscious decision to redirect its approach to building its core services and products. We collectively declared that design must be involved from the beginning to the end of every lifecycle of everything we launched. Design when stripped bare is the art of communication. Being in the business of crowd source data across the globe there are many challenges constructing an application that will intuitively serve in a diverse range of uses cases, across cultures and varying degrees of accessibility to technology.

In response to these challenges 3.0 begun by asking the right questions to users who have seen Ushahidi’s powerful ability to serve people around the world. Our community of stakeholders, influential people in the Ushahidi and crowdsourcing communities and users of the platform from deployers, contributors and reporters, had the opportunity to participate in thinking about our approach to design.

Gabriel White, Designer and User Interface expert at Small Surfaces, summarized his findings. The big ask from the community was to ensure that the new platform would allow for alternative forms of representing data outside the framework of mapping. In order to better serve the crowd it was important to think about how best to redesign our own understanding of data.

The process of designing 3.0 has been quite arduous because we’ve had to think about how our ability to visually perceive and interpret data is largely affected by cultural dynamics. Redesigning 3.0 has been a process in not only defining what Ushahidi’s visual culture will be in the future but also defining how we can take complex sources of information and make them digestible to our users.