Civic Tech

USAID & Building Resiliency World-Wide

ResilienceLinks exemplifies how targeted enhancements to a digital platform can significantly improve its utility and effectiveness in addressing complex global challenges. Through a combination of quick wins and strategic long-term planning, Bixal helped USAID enhance the ResilienceLinks platform, fostering better global collaboration and support for communities facing crises.

The widest image in the entire corpus at 15000×2857 — the heuristic evaluation as a two-by-two, "Quick Short-term Fixes" against "Long-term Improvements for better heuristics". Only 10 OCR words survive because it is almost entirely sticky notes, so its content is effectively unread: this is a case where the artifact is intact and the evidence is not. Needs a human read at full resolution before anything is quoted from it.

Clients/Partners: USAID
Roles: Design Manager, Federal Projects
Industry: Civic Tech
Deliverables: Analytics , Card Sorting , Content Strategy , Heuristic Analysis , Information Architecture , Personas , Research Planning , Roadmapping , Workshops

Overview

01 / Problem: ResilienceLinks is USAID's knowledge platform for practitioners helping communities withstand crisis. The site didn't say what it was for, its top search term was "amazon," and "resilience" meant something different to each audience.
02 / Design Challenge: Through Bixal, Russ was to evaluate the site and build a roadmap for the team, without access to the site's users.
03 / Approach: He scored the client's thirteen-item wish list on audience specificity and complexity, turning it into a sequenced roadmap. With no users to talk to, he built personas from job postings and public bios and audited heuristics, content, analytics and search.
04 / Outcome: An audit, a roadmap and V1 comps, checked with a tree test and eight visual-preference sessions. Nothing shows what shipped, and the case study's "Happy Clients" section has no support.