Case study

Impact Atlas

Designing scalable tools for global poverty-reduction programs: mapping participant selection, field visits, and multi-level reporting across program organizers, branch managers, and regional teams.

Role

UX Design Lead

Team

Me, a product manager, a product owner on the client side, a visual designer, and two engineers

Timeline

July 2015 to January 2016

Platform

Field research
Whiteboard sessions
Axure Pro

Impact Atlas marketing page showing visualization in the background.

Problem: Participant tracking ran on paper carried house to house, and couldn't scale across four roles that each needed a different view of the same data.
Opportunity: Digitize it without redesigning how the program worked: role-specific views for each level of the hierarchy, built from the user stories each role already lived by.
Result: A paper process only one person could see at a time became role-specific views that all four levels of the program could act on at once.

Built for Amplifier Strategies, digitizing a program running BRAC's Ultra-Poor Graduation approach.

Paper worked house to house, but four roles needed four different views of it.

Direction kept changing, so I stopped waiting for clarity and got answers myself.

Handwritten paper form used to track a participant's savings and program membership in the field

The system before Impact Atlas: a handwritten paper form, tracked house to house.

The paper process already encoded a working hierarchy of four roles.

Program Organizer collects, Branch Manager verifies, Regional Manager analyzes, Finance Manager oversees.

Digitizing meant preserving that structure, with views built from each role's user stories.

Proposed strategy narrative mapped by role (Program Organizer, Branch Manager, Regional Manager) from the journey map

Role-specific views, mapped from the journey: click to open full PDF

Research started from the paper system itself: visit schedules, means-test forms, hand-tallied ledgers.

The rest came from asking the team who needed to see what.

Women in a program cohort receiving supplies in the field — The people the paper system was tracking: a program cohort in the field.

Field team reviewing a handwritten participant ledger in a village setting — The paper system this was replacing: a handwritten participant ledger, reviewed in the field.

Hand-drawn village maps and a participant record book, full view — The hand-drawn village map and record book, in full, click to enlarge.

A tethered cow at a participant's homestead in the field — A household asset in the field, the kind of enterprise the program tracked.

All field photos shot by me during the original program visits.

Unlike the other case studies, this one started as a hand-drawn participant profile sketch.

User stories went role by role on a whiteboard, then into a role/data architecture.

Team member reviewing early sketches at a table — Early sketches under review with the team.

Whiteboard with user stories written for each program role — User stories, one per role: M&E Director, Program Organizer, Regional Manager, Branch Manager.

Whiteboard mapping data and role architecture across PO, BM, RM, and FM — Role and data architecture: what each layer of the hierarchy needed access to.

The participant profile, sketched on paper first.

Sketches became annotated wireframes, tagged by role, with edge cases called out on the frame.

Annotated wireframe of the participant selection flow with color-coded role tags and edge-case notes — Annotated wireframes: each screen tagged top-left with the color-coded role it belongs to (PO, BM, RM), the same colors carried through the journey map's swim lanes.

Mobile wireframe of the Impact Atlas navigation menu, participants list, and landing page — Mobile navigation: main menu through to a participant's landing page.

Mobile wireframe of visualizations and reports, including participant enterprise charts — Mobile visualizations + reports: participant chart landing page through to enterprise detail.

Desktop view of participant data metrics.

Full wireframe deck, 60 pages →

My work carried through the journey map, wireframes, and an interactive Axure prototype, tested before I left.

The team took it to production: 10 graduation milestones, every device, English, French, and Arabic.

So the finished screenshots below came after a handoff, not one unbroken build.

Impact Atlas shown across laptops, tablets, and phones, in English, French, and Arabic — Deployed across devices and localized into French and Arabic, alongside English.

Graduation milestones tracked

1.6M

Households graduated from the program

20-30

Participants per community cohort

$3.20

Returned for every $1 invested

BRAC's approach has a strong record: 95% lift out of extreme poverty, 93% still gaining a decade later.

Those are the methodology's results, not the tool's.

The tool's value: one paper ledger became views all four levels could act on at once.

Systems Design
Social Impact
Enterprise