DHIS2 Design Lab: exploring how to support and promote user-oriented design and innovation within the DHIS2 ecosystem
Session on the DHIS2 Annual Conference, Thursday 24th of June at 15:00 CET
Magnus Li, Doctoral Research Fellow, and DHIS2 Design Lab lead, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo
DHIS2 is increasingly flexible for implementation in different use-cases and across user organizations with diverse needs. This represents both a challenge and an opportunity. Firstly, the diverse user audience makes it difficult to design a usable and relevant solution that fits all on the generic level of design. Meanwhile, significant technical and ‘social’ capacity is required during implementation (e.g., in DHIS2 configuration, app development, project management, user domain knowledge). However, with increased flexibility to configure and extend DHIS2 during implementation into specific user organizations, DHIS2 is becoming an infrastructure for implementation-level design and innovation.
In the DHIS2 Design Lab, we explore how we can support and promote user-oriented design and innovation within the DHIS2 ecosystem. With ‘user-oriented design and innovation’, we refer to efforts particularly aimed at building usable and relevant tools that are valuable to the end-users’ (e.g., health workers) practices and needs. We explore this topic by studying the practices and processes of design and innovation carried out by DHIS2 practitioners and the social and technical resources that (may) enable and constrain these. We also explore and develop resources intended to support and promote more user-oriented design and innovation, such as guidelines for DHIS2 app development and the use of design and innovation methods.
In our session on Thursday at 15:00, we will talk a bit about what we do, some of our key findings from the past, and our plans for the future. Particularly, we will look at how three conditions affect the potential for user-oriented design and innovation in DHIS2 implementation projects: 1) affordable design flexibility, 2) implementation-level design practices, and 3) project configuration. Related to the three conditions, we will discuss their implications and how we aim to address them in our ongoing projects.
We are very interested in getting in touch with you if you have experience (positive or negative) with user-oriented design and innovation, DHIS2 web-app development, or the use of agile methods during DHIS2 implementation. If you are interested in sharing your experiences, please submit your email here, and we’ll get in touch with you for a chat!
Looking forward to seeing many of you on Thursday!