It is not easy to assess information about whether governments are meeting their policy commitments on water supply, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). It’s also difficult to find out how much they are budgeting for these services. WASHwatch.org aims to help address this gap with an online platform for monitoring government commitments and financing. On the site you can compare country scores for the commitments they have made and find out whether they are meeting them or not. The site encourages user contribution asking people to share their experiences, information and evidence.

Aptivate was asked by WaterAid to design and develop a new website with a better user experience and new features. We built the site in Django and implemented the new brand as part of the design. We created a unique approach for the information architecture in order to provide users with what they needed. This required user testing to make sure people could understand the interface and features.

The project started soon after the pitch with a discovery phase to understand the aims, scope out a plan and start coming up with design ideas. Tim Brewer was leading the team at WaterAid and we worked together to communicate with end users and understand their requirements. The site gives a worldwide view showing countries with poor water and sanitation, engaging policy makers and local NGO's giving them the advocacy information they need.

Aptivate was successfull in winning the pitch at Wateraid and the project started soon after with a discovery phase to scope out the project and start coming up with design ideas. Tim Brewer was leading the team at WaterAid and we worked together to communicate with end users and understand their rquirements. Site site aims to give a worldwide view of countires with poor water and sanition equging policy makers and local NGO's giving them the advacy information they need.

WaterAid were keen to work in an agile way for this project so that we could work on the requirements, learning as we went. It was not clear what the discovery would reveal so flexibility of features and development was key to a successful workflow. We agreed an agile contract that allowed them to book our time an iteration at a time and work through the tasks creating features, testing and getting user feedback as we went.

Part of the challenge of the project was understanding how we could encourage greater participation from these users. We worked with the client and the users to determine how to achieve this and make it easy for people to contribute to the information on the website. We ended up implementing some simple features for this so that we could test whether people are willing to participate in this way.