Antara is a NGO working for maternal and child health – maternal deaths, under 5 mortality, malnutrition among children.
My Role
UX designer for thegeekslab consulting for Antara
Target Audience
India has three cadres of Community Health Worker (CHWs). The first created is the Auxiliary Nurse
Midwife (ANM), who is based at a sub-center and visits villages in addition to providing care at the
subcenter. The second is the Anganwadi Worker (AWW), who works solely in her village and focuses on provision of food supplements to young children, adolescent girls, and lactating women. The most
recently created cadre is the Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA), who also works solely in her village. ASHA workers focus on promotion of MCH, including immunizations and institutional-based deliveries, for which they receive a performance-related fee.
Auxiliary nurse midwife(ANM)– who is based at a sub center and visits villages in addition to provide
care at the sub center
Anganwadi(AWW)– works in her village and focuses on provision of food supplements to young
children, adolescent girls and lactating women.
Accredited social health activist(ASHA)- works in her village to carry out immunizations and institutional based deliveries.
There are at present 208,000 ANMs, 1.2 million AWWs, and 857,000 ASHA workers. They each have their own supervisory systems and payment systems.
ANMs receive 18 months of training while AWWs and ASHA workers each receive 3–4 weeks with
additional trainings from time to time.
ANMs are now officially Multipurpose Workers (MPWs) with a broad set of responsibilities, including the support of AWWs and ASHA workers. Some obtain additional training to manage birth complications and refer women with complications to higher levels of care, and some obtain additional training for insertion of intrauterine devices. AWWs manage nutritional supplementation at anganwadi centers for young
children, adolescent girls, and lactating women. They also help with promotion of healthy behaviors and mobilization of the community for improved water and sanitation, participation in immunization activities and other special health activities. ASHA workers are given performance-based incentives that focus
around facilitating institutional deliveries, immunizations, provision of basic medicines (including oral
contraceptives), and referral of patients to the sub-center.
Final Product
This unique smart solution links all three frontline workers (AAA). Though they serve the same
community, they don’t team up naturally because of different supervisory systems, databases and
work cultures. Further, they are expected to maintain numerous voluminous registers. They can
improve effectiveness and efficiency by sharing data.
While some technology solutions for frontline workers exist, none bring them together. This app
enables the AAA to utilise a common database, carry out their routine tasks with ease and maintain
integrity of data. It also generates essential government reports, provides an online supervision
dashboard and enables referrals.
Through all this, the workers can focus on their primary responsibility of delivering care, aided by
data.
The ANM app, AWW app, ASHA app were designed in turn to solve the problems of the CHWs to
enable swift delivery of services, reduce wait time, efficient database entry, periodical assessment
of patients and laying out of a simple yet effective workplan for the CHWs to plan their day to make
their day more manageable. All three of them were compiled in one app with registered user
logins leading to respective aflows.
Impact
We focused on the CHWs of Rajasthan as the presence of the NGO was prevalent in some regions.
Later on it has significantly expanded its operations across other states too. The app was
inaugurated by the then CM of Rajasthan Smt. Vasundhra Raje.
What was my process?
The project started with visiting the Jhalawaad village along with some members from the Antara team. I worked closely with Damini(Project Coordinator-Antara) and Rahul (Project Coordinator-Antara) to gain insights into the pain points that were there in the existing designs. Apart from them i took help from my chief UX designer Shaurya Rawat whenever i ran into deadlocks of some sort and for brainstorming on
specific junctures and also whenever i needed that spurge of creativity.
So all these people were really helpful in the designing of the apps and seeing this whole project into
completion.
The process started with the existing designs, listing down user feedback, all the pain points, reassessing the goals from the design. MArket competition was not much hence was not a big part in the process.
User interviews, surveys were conducted to get a better understanding of all that was there and the
feedback of the common people in the village as well as the CHWs were recorded at due intervals. We
also conducted on-boarding workshops to let the users know about the feasibility of the existing/
upcoming features and understand their user journeys and for us to understand the different personas.
This part of understanding the user scenarios was very insightful as i had never worked on a product which had an impact on the grassroot level of the society. This whole experience was very humbling.
The designing part started with the low fidelity sketches , iterations and feedback also at the user level
(sometimes). Mostly i worked with Damini and we had extensively iterated on the paper sketches to solve all the feature requests noted in the excel format as well as cover the pain points of the existing designs.
When the low fi iterations were done enough and we were convinced by holding numerous brainstorming sessions we decided to go ahead to make the high fidelity mockups. The final prototypes were made in sketch software and were showcased in marvellapp after a certain level of iterations of the app UI.
What were the challenges which were overcome ?
The lo fi wireframes were made in english for easy iterations and for final prototypes the english
was translated into hindi through google. The following section tells us briefly about the challenges
we faced and the solutions we drew out.