CAVIA

App design for evidence not hearsay

As we sat with Kaila during our first meeting she presented to us the use of the app within her organization. She began by explaining AIDS-Free World is an international advocacy organization founded in 2007 with the intent of tackling the underlying inequalities that allowed HIV to become a global plague. In 2015, AIDS-Free World launched the Code Blue Campaign, which is dedicated to ending structural impunity for sexual abuse committed by UN personnel. She wanted us to design the CAVIA, a mobile application that will help with the Code Blue Campaign by revolutionizing how institutions engage with the communities they serve, and ensure that all voices that should be heard are part of the conversation.

The CAVIA app design posed us with an interesting problem: to design a mobile application that enables individual audio self-recording, allowing users to orally record answers to open-ended questions.

With this app design we kept 3 goals in mind:

To create this design we were a team of 3: 2 UX designers (Khalid and Charles) and myself as the UI designer.

I used an inception diagram to begin my design process. An inception diagram is a design tool to help you address the goal of your design through the mood you want it to convey as well as the design’s visual language.

For this design our goal was to create an app that allows women sexually assaulted/abused by UN Personnel/Peacekeepers to voice record their stories anonymously to later be uploaded securely.

I presented the client with 2 potential mood boards.

The first mood board was inspired by the first personality the client mentioned that she wanted CAVIA to portray which was for CAVIA to be feminist. Therefore, I wanted the first mood board to be feminist, bold, and boundary pushing, while also illustrating inclusivity.

My second mood board was Inspired by the other personalities the client mentioned; I wanted this mood board to portray fearlessness, strength, be eye-catching, and bold

Logo iterations began with the letter C from CAVIA and making it look like 2 speech bubbles. To further indicate conversation I added quotes.

The quotes made the logo to complex especially at a smaller size.

I then simply used the C and made different iterations of the speech bubbles.

Although it was a minor change the speech bubbles that are on the same side were much more obvious than those on opposite sides. Furthermore, the lighter CAVIA complimented the bold speech bubbles better — therefore I picked the 4th logo as seen above.

As UX started designing I saw their mid-fis come to life. As I saw what they designed, I started to feel a bit overwhelmed by the emptiness I saw on the screens.

The UX team had a great idea when testing the functionality of the app with low-literacy users: text that an interviewee would see would be written in French but read out loud in English. This provided the team great feedback for the importance of specific and recognizable iconography.

Based on the clients’ ask, they wanted the app to function in 3rd world countries which held UN peacekeeping missions. With this in mind, I wanted to design the app in dark mode as it conserves around 30% of battery power. I would want to use minimal images to conserve battery.

For the dark mode design I would use the Material Design guidelines for background, colours, and buttons.

I wanted to add delight to the logo, bringing in all aspects and personalities the client wanted CAVIA app to portray: feminist, eye-catching, bold, inclusive.

I felt as though even though the logo can be seen as a logo system; in this first loading screen it was interesting to introduction the potential users of the app.

To provide users with some extra feedback I wanted to animate the question and recording screens. The question screen as seen on the left would provide the user the ability to play the question, pause it, and play it back using either the button or the slider bar. The slider bar would move as the question was read out load. And the play button would animate to a pause button.

While a user was to record their answer and the app was capturing their voice, the record button would pulse. The pulse effect gives the user feedback that the app is recording while not relying on a colour change therefore increasing its’ accessibility.

Finally, if a user were to playback their recording, the individual waves would animate.

To ensure this animations accessibility, the individual sound wave changes colour and size to indicate that it is playing. The entire recording also shifts as it is played. These animations are useful feedback for any user.

To conclude we were able to build an app that allows individuals which may have low literacy to anonymously voice record their answers to open ended questions.

However, when developing the app, the team should consider asking more varied signifying questions to get a more insightful analysis from users. Making the final video very clear about the intended uses of the interview, thanking the users for sharing their stories and letting them know that it was a privilege to hear what they had to say, and providing them with information as to where they can get further help.

An identifying system will have to put in place to find the audio files after they are uploaded in case a participant decides they want to withdraw their answer or withdraw consent for certain used cases.

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