The SalamaTech project supports Syrian civil society and human rights defenders to operate safely and effectively online. Since the project launch in 2012, the SalamaTech team has helped tens of thousands of Syrians learn how to stay safe online in Syria and the region, through training, emergency response, awareness campaigns, and expert support.
This project operates mainly online because of the difficult state of affairs in the region. Their website and social media are essential tools to reach people in distress.
Problem
In 2017 the numbers of the site starting dropping down dramatically, putting at risk the continuation of the main SecDev Foundation’s project. We needed to find out what was happening with our users, and change the page in order to revert the problem.
Target Audience:
Women, youth, and civil society organizations located in Syria, needing digital citizenship education, in order to be safe online.
Less is More, says the wise words.
After doing several interviews and questionnaires with our local teams and beneficiaries, we realized that the website that had been recently re-done by an in-project developer, contained too many graphics and effects (parallax effects, animations) and with a wartime internet it was almost impossible to load.
We talked to the end-user and they expressed they didn’t need fancy graphics. they just needed a fast loading site, where they could easily find useful information.
I was responsible for the new development. The first thing I did after reading the interview and survey data, was to meet with our in-house developer to assess what could we do to optimize loading times.
We decided to do a page with a very light image at the beginning with the project definition, and the rest to do it text-based.
I created the wireframes, taking into account that Arabic is written right to left.
I did the high fidelity mockup which was reviewed by our Syrian partners, while our developer builds the base structure of the site.
I created all the visual assets and supervised the site followed the approved design.
Currently, images have been added to articles again, because most of the people in our reach, use Turkish internet which is better than the local providers.