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Bhai Thamen
Bhai Thamen
Bhai Thamen is a mobile app designed to empower and support women by providing a digital tool for safe mobility. After conducting a comprehensive requirement analysis with Tech Academy, we developed this app to offer several key features:
It enables women to confront harassers directly,
Allows them to quickly share their GPS location with trusted contacts and report incidents to relevant authorities for immediate help,
Includes a women-only social media function for community sharing, where users can warn others about unsafe areas, and
Features an integrated map to evaluate places and suggest safer routes.
My Role: Project Lead
Goal: To translate the ideas from 250+ user feedback into design and make the app ready for playstore release.
Deliverable Links:
Full Wireframe Design (high level)
Media Coverage: https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/226202/bhaithamen-to-arm-women-against-sexual-harassment
We had a total of 1200 downloads in the first month of our release. The app was warmly welcomed by the urban working women of Dhaka.
IVR integration in Hellotask
IVR integration in Hellotask
Hellotask is a mobile application for maid-booking in Bangladesh. The goal of their app is to digitize the process of finding domestic help. Despite the initial promise of the platform, it encountered sustainability challenges - as domestic workers were not remaining engaged after a few sessions.
To understand the issue, a multidisciplinary team of ethnographers and human-centered designers from the University of Toronto and Monash University conducted a systematic evaluation of the existing operational framework of Hellotask. Our analysis identified a few critical factors behind the platform's inefficacy.
Operational Model: Hellotask's reliance on a middle-man model necessitated local guides to act as intermediaries between clients and maids. It created friction in user experience and introduced unnecessary complexity to the maid booking process.
Technological Barriers: A significant portion of the maid workforce lacked access to modern technology, such as smartphones, thus unable to engage with the app directly. Also, there was a marked deficiency in technological literacy among the target demographic, it complicated direct interactions with the platform.
User Discomfort: Our interviews, FGDs and observational studies revealed that many maids expressed discomfort with the intermediary role of local guides, preferring direct communication with clients to foster trust and improve job satisfaction.
In response to these findings, we designed and implemented an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. It enabled maids to connect directly with clients via the Hellotask server without even having a smartphone or the need for local guides.
The successful deployment of the IVR system resulted in a significant increase in maid engagement and retention on the platform. Hellotask also expanded to seven more areas after this system improvement.
The full report including the methods, findings, and technical specifications of this study can be accessed here. See the media coverage here.
sohopathi.net
sohopathi.net
From August 2020 to February 2021, I worked as the User Experience and relationship manager at Mainframe Labs, Dhaka, Bangladesh. I worked for improving their online educational platform startup 'Sohopathi'. Doing this, I:
Generated research plan for making their existing peer-to-peer online learning platform more interactive and user friendly.
Conducted regular surveys, interviews, FGD, and participatory design sessions with target users (250+ students, teachers, and parents)
Presented actionable design recommendations and led design critiques regularly.
Our team's research and design effort increased the website visit duration by 40%, and the click-through rate on course pages by 30%.
Corona Fact Check
Corona Fact Check
Corona Fact Check is an integrated approach to combat COVID-19 Related Disinformation on Social Media. On March 11, 2020, COVID-19 was declared as global pandemic, and since then 39.3M people are affected worldwide, and 386K in BD. However, there is another battle people are fighting - ‘Disinformation related to COVID-19’. Sharing misinformation got dangerous like wildfire in Bangladesh as it created a snowball effect where one misinformation generated others as people kept sharing them.
People with limited education, certain religious beliefs, and especially older adults have been badly affected due to this spread of misinformation. As a result, they didn't follow the precautionary measures e.g., social distancing, and even caused material or bodily harm not being aware. Disinformation consisted of conspiracy theories and others related to origin, scale, prevention, treatment, etc. We encountered a few examples from Bangladesh about medicine, religion or even about harassment. All these caused panic, mistrust, and unrest among people.
We, a group of researchers from Bangladesh, USA, and Canada, thought of developing an integrated technology to detect misinformation and alert the users.
Target User group:
Older adults (age >50, have access to internet, familiar to technology).
Intervention:
Browser extension, Messenger reach, and awareness website.
See the requirement analysis, which we published as a paper in CSCW, here.
See the details of the project here.
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