Mobile App for Global Counter Terrorism Forum (GCTF)
Overview
The GCTF (Global Counter Terrorism Forum) Lifecycle Toolkit delivers good practices for countering violent extremism (CVE) as developed through Department of State GCTF’s “Life Cycle of Radicalization to Violence” initiative to policymakers and implementers. These good practices are vital elements of CVE throughout the entire life cycle of radicalization and include prevention, detection and intervention, and rehabilitation and reintegration programs.
MetroStar Systems designed and developed the GCTF Toolkit website. This particular project is to design and develop a mobile application for the counter terrorism practitioners in the field.
One of the main pain point of the GCTF website is that many of these practitioners work in areas where Internet connectivity is either unreliable or unavailable, preventing them from accessing the information they need. Based on this unique challenge, we design and delivered offline capability, enabling the GCTF mobile application to provide CVE tools and practices to boots on the ground, regardless of internet connection.
Project Goal
Create a mobile app for iOS and Android so that counter terrorism practitioners can access GCTF resources such as best practices, experts, website, videos offline. Integrate library and forum features to personalize experience and promote collaboration among counter terrorism practitioners around the world.
My Role
As the lead UX Architect of GCTF mobile app. I lead the discovery process and wireframing, interaction design and the social media analytics integration. The app was well received among the global counter terrorism community and was presented in GCTF's annual meeting.
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Skill/Tool Used
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User Research
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Presentation
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Stakeholder Interview
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Design Studio
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Content Strategy
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Wireframing
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Prototyping
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Content Modeling
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Sketch
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Craft
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Invision
Discovery
As a part of the app design discovery process, we interview stakeholders and found the main pain point of GCTF members was that they couldn't access the content of the toolkit in areas without internet connectivity. Another challenge we had was to present a lot of text heavy documents on a mobile phone. We explored many different design solution and came up with a card based system where content was organized under different tabs for easy access.
As the lead UX designer of the mobile app, with one other visual designer, we created a novel card based UI system to engaging users. By creating a novel interaction between content and search card, a logical flow was created to keep the UX fluid and encourage users to frequently and quickly reference the material presented by the GCTF.
Home Phase Cards
The GCTF Toolkit provides real-time access to the latest research from international organizations and recognized global experts on the subject of counter terrorism. With the GCTF Toolkit application, the user will have access to some of the most informative websites, videos, and social media trends specifically filtered on the subject of counterterrorism to ensure our users can access the data they need as quickly and as easily as possible.
We integrated library feature into the app so user can save different types of content and access them later offline.
Library Feature of the GCTF App
We gave user granular control of what content to download in their phone in settings section of the app.
Settings
The video at the beginning of this case study was created to promote the app. It also summarize the main features of the app. Our video producer Derek Campbell and Craig Budd created this video based on the design assests created by me and visual designer Allie Kohr.
We integrated social media analytics visual into the app using data visualization provided by Zoomph, a social media analytics company. Here are a few screens demonstrating how we integrated those analytics visuals. these visuals help community building and show the trendy topics about counter terrorisms around the world.
