Enhancing User Experience and Engagement

Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)

As part of my tenure with J-PAL, an organization based at MIT dedicated to eradicating poverty through evidence-based research, I had the privilege of contributing to a significant milestone: its 20th anniversary. This milestone presented an exciting opportunity to revamp and optimize key aspects of the povertyactionlab.org website and to make significant product changes to improve the user experience for both internal and external customers.

1. Research Resources Reimagined

Resources have value only if they can be found by the people who need them. The legacy J-PAL site, built in 2016, was not intended to host the hundreds of research materials now maintained there.

After a sudden donation from a key partner, we embarked on creating a new user experience that accounted for increased taxonomy, improved search, and an updated look and feel. Because of donor constraints, these changes had to be made in a three-month period—a daunting task for any strategist!

I went to work thinking about user flow and scalability for adding future toolkits and resources. After multiple rounds of feedback from internal stakeholders, we moved into development to create a more dynamic, simplified design for our existing landing page.

3. Other Projects

As part of the global 20th-anniversary celebrations, J-PAL's seven regional offices sought to highlight their impact over the years and engage both donors and partners. This resulted in the creation of anniversary templates, the first of which is the "Southeast Asia at 10" microsite. Designed with precision and enriched with captivating visuals, this template encapsulates the regional office's achievements, fostering deeper donor engagement and showcasing the tangible difference J-PAL has made in Southeast Asia.

2. Innovative Resource Toolkit

While making the existing Research Resources page more intuitive, I recognized the need for greater flexibility in our research and toolkit templates. At the time, the pages were inflexible and could only be edited by the central webteam. I embarked on an in-depth analysis of competitor websites and led team discussions to better understand user needs and ensure scalability.

What resulted was not only my new design, but entirely new functionality on the backend of our Drupal site. We implemented the layout builder to give users greater access without worrying about code and to increase permissions for landing page creation. This allowed teams from all over the world to make templated changes without having to learn html/css and without having to submit a web ticket.

The common thread across these projects is my commitment to enhancing the user experience, fostering engagement, and presenting data-driven results to stakeholders in an accessible way. Through reimagining research resources, developing an innovative resource toolkit, and creating compelling microsite templates, I am proud to have played a pivotal role in commemorating J-PAL's two decades of impactful work in the fight against poverty.