Digital Educational Resources Are Abundant. Reliable Internet Access Is Not.
According to the UN Broadband Commission, half of the global population lives offline. An estimated 3.8 billion people are unconnected and unable to benefit from key social and economic resources in our expanding digital world.
Meet Valentin Kravtchenko: he's mastered the art of "growth-hacking" and chooses to use it for good. He founded Grey.box in 2020, a social innovation startup that provides free WiFi access to resources in remote areas where internet access is unreliable.
To achieve this, Grey.box developed UNI: a low-cost tiny box that creates a portable hotspot providing wireless access to pre-loaded digital resources. UNI is fully customizable and can host local files as well as websites. Designed to provide offline access to educational resources like Wikipedia and Khan Academy, UNI is making pivotal resources accessible to individuals and organizations worldwide.
Intuitive Regardless of Digital Literacy
Kravtchenko asked us to create a mobile interface for UNI to facilitate accessing and modifying resources. As the platform allows users to locally store files and websites for use regardless of internet availabilty, its main use case is environments with low or unreliable internet access. As such, the application had to be easy to use for people without our generally-assumed level of digital experience.
Overhauling the Interface
The interface that Kravtchenko shared with us was a direct copy of the desktop version and maladapted to mobile use:
The two crucial processes needing improvement the most?
(1) File management.
(2) User management.
Our objective: a complete redesign of the existing UNI app focusing on these key areas, while accommodating for older Android devices and varied digital literacy levels.
Make It Easy
Informed by multiple rounds of user testing and refining, we finalized a high-fidelity prototype that our test users were able to learn and navigate easily. We introduced homepage customization, access codes to simplify user management, and restructured the file management system.
Sign In:
Home Page:
User Management:
File Management:
Drawing Inspiration
By performing a competitor analysis, I gathered insight into which applications are operating the most effectively in Grey.box's focus areas. Kiwix offered the most useful comparison for file management, and Google Drive for user management.
Kiwix's simple categorization system differentiates website access and local files without complicating access to either. However, some items are nested numerous folders in and can be tedious to locate due to a lack of sorting options or search functionality. Drawing on Kiwix's simplicity, we optimized UNI's homepage to create quicker access to important files and websites.
Inspired by Google Drive's sharing functionality but the tediousness of individually entering recipients' names, we introduced access codes to replace the time-consuming administrative nature of individualized user management. Now, a whole class can easily access shared documents instantly. Access codes can be changed anytime for secure and immediate user management.
Ready to Globally Transform Education
As a team, we succeeded in creating a user-friendly mobile interface for people with low digital literacy. Using effective visual hierarchy, clear navigation, and guiding cues, we streamlined user management, simplified file management and created home page customization, resulting in an easy-to-use app for rural teachers and their students. UNI is currently doing pilot projects, and our interface will be used in Mexico, Congo, Madagascar, Togo, Cameroon, and Somalia to offer students educational opportunities that would otherwise remain logistically inaccessible.
