Peace Corps Vanuatu
Goal: Design, develop and transfer a responsive and low bandwidth website for the Ministry of Youth and Sports in 6 months.
My role on the team: Brainstorming, design thinking, information architecture, ux design, ui design
My deliverables: Wireframes, workflow prototypes, ux design, ui design
Agency: Peace Corps Vanuatu
Assimilating
For my second stint in the Peace Corps, I held the position of a Web Design and Development Consultant in Port Vila, Vanuatu for six months. I worked with the Ministry of Youth and Sports, a national branch of government in the island nation of Vanuatu. Read more in my blog post on why I decided to take a leave of absence to work in the South Pacific.
Gathering and learning
The goal was to provide the Ministry with a responsive website that focused on being low bandwidth to be easily accessible from remote islands around the country. It was also important to train employees at the Ministry on how to manage and update the website once it is built since my time in country was limited. During the beginning stages of this project, I spent a lot of time with all the stake holders in the national government, learning about what exactly the Ministry did in Vanuatu and gaining trust and buy in.
Designing for environmental considerations
All government offices in Vanuatu use Joomla as their CMS. I designed the site with 3G networks on remote islands in mind, limiting the amount of media on the pages, as well as clicks that the user would have make, while using their data for page loads. The pages were designed on a design system that scaled from primary pages to secondary pages having the same layout and design. The most difficult aspect of this project was gathering content from over 40 islands spread across the Pacific Ocean, some with limited access to the internet. Read more about what I learned working as a web design consultant in the South Pacific.
Training for sustainability
I trained three employees at the Ministry on how to update the Joomla site with new content, as well as how to manage the social media that we had set up. The training was perceived as successful by the national government which led to a government wide training to fifty employees, offering professional development skills in the fundamentals of web design.
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