As we wrapped up the redesign of the IDB website, the team reached out to see if Analogous could assist with a redesign of their mapping tool, MapAmericas.

MapAmericas was used as a secondary mechanism for IDB employees in the field to input project data, with the additional benefit of geo-targeting projects and their corresponding results. The public-facing map featured every project across Latin America, introducing users to contextual information within a click. The concept was useful, but the interface segmented projects by country, had limited filtered views and the iconography overlapped and confused navigation. With a low adoption rate by all users, we had our work cut out for us.

As I wrote up a heuristic evaluation of the user experience, the design team researched mapping solutions out in the wild to review the variety of visual and experiential options in play. After a review of all our findings, we settled in on an overarching approach:

1. The project map couldn’t exist as a destination point in the global navigation. While it had the potential of being be a smart, useful visualization of regional projects, it just didn’t fit the context of how users browse or might use it. We decided early on that the map needed to be accessed contextually from project, sector and country pages while providing avenues to return to the same templates when appropriate
2. There’s a large amount of structured data found on project pages, but only structured in terms of the information design of the page, which allowed for great readability. We needed to free up data as explicit attributes for filtering purposes to navigate within the map interface.
3. The overlap issue needed to be address, so we decided upon a clustering approach for projects living in nearby proximity at high-level views, and situations when exact geo-coordinates overlapped. We also created two tiers to the map—a pre-project view and a project/results view—which allowed for different behaviors specific to the context of the current task.

The resulting experience now allows users to view projects across all of Latin America, but subsets particular to persona interests. So an Education Minister in Bolivia can view all education projects in her country, and then broaden the results to show education project across the entire continent, allowing for better context. Similarly, data points such as total cost and phase were made available as filters, so that same user can now view projects in the approval phase that cost $50M-$100M. These were simple, yet powerful changes to the browse paradigm.

Once the user drills down to a particular project view, results are now explicitly tied to the project, whereas previously, results lived within their own view with no discernible relationship to a project and/or a mechanism to get more project information. The cognitive result is an immediate processing of scale—how many outcomes were produced by a single initiative.

A decent amount of code tweaking remains in order to get the experience exactly right, but that should occur over the next few months. Once we have usage numbers, I’ll update this post.