WikiRate

Crowd-research platform

By Vignesh Prasad, Principal Product Designer at Ebury

WikiRate.org lets people discover and contribute to the most prominent openly accessible database of environmental, social and governmental (ESG) data, all in one place. European Commission funded WikiRate. As a collaborative platform, it aims to serve as a tool for people to research and find data points from sources that answer essential questions about companies.

My Contribution (2014 - 2018)

I started working on this project in Feb 2014 while it was an MVP. I took on different roles in the context of UX. I am both the UX architect and front-end engineer in the team. Initially, it was challenging to change my function and workflow according to the needs, priorities and deadlines. Gradually, it became efficient and more natural to switch hats.

As a part of front-end engineering, I proposed and implemented UI patterns, standard layouts structures and UI components using Ruby, CoffeeScript, SCSS and HAML templates.

On an ideal UX sprint, I design wireframes, UI components and collaborate with the researchers and other engineers located in different countries for feedback, feature proposals and discuss further dev improvements to the platform.

Occasionally, I carry out UX research activities such as reviewing user interview transcripts, think-aloud sessions with users, review user logs, heuristic evaluation and observation sessions during events.

I cycled through these workflows every few weeks.

+----------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| ROLES                | TOOLS                | TECHNOLOGIES         |
+----------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| UX research          | Sketch               | Ruby                 |
| UI design            | Invisionapp          | Decko                |
| Branding             | Atom                 | SASS                 |
| Front-end            | iTerm                | HAML                 |
| Data visualisation   |                      | CoffeeScript         |
+----------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

My workflow

As a designer

User Research Activities ⇢ Personas and Scenarios ⇢ Interaction design/Wireframes/Mockups ⇢ Collaborate & Gather Feedback on Invisionapp ⇢ High Fidelity Designs ⇢ Process Feedback ⇢ Iterate

As a developer

Develop Working Prototypes ⇢ User Tests ⇢ Implement designs, UI components and modules ⇢ Collaborate & Gather Feedback ⇢ Iterate

Related publication

Richard Mills, Stefano De Paoli, Sotiris Diplaris, Vasiliki Gkatziaki, Symeon Papadopoulos, Srivigneshwar R. Prasad, Ethan McCutchen, Vishal Kapadia, Philipp Hirche (2016). WikiRate.org – Leveraging Collective Awareness to Understand Companies’ Environmental, Social and Governance Performance. In Internet Science, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, pp. 74–88.