UX Services
The Engine Room are now providing free UX services to designers and developers of internet freedom tools.
OTF's UXD Lab and The Engine Room
In July 2024, The Engine Room joined the Open Technology Fund's User Experience & Discovery (UXD) Lab as service providers.
The UXD Lab is dedicated to improving the user-experience design of internet freedom tools by helping projects better understand the needs of their user communities, and supporting them to make their tools usable and accessible to all.
OTF supports technology-focused projects that advance internet freedom, and counteract repressive online censorship and state surveillance. Such projects include circumvention and anti-censorship tools, privacy-enhancing technologies, and internet shutdown resilience tools, among others.
With over ten years of experience in user experience (UX) research, we strongly believe that resource-constrained human rights defenders, activist and journalist communities, especially those in repressive environments in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and the MENA region, should be primary target user groups for internet freedom tools.
These groups can provide important feedback to the developers and designers of internet freedom tools and provide crucial evidence on what works, how, and in what context.
User Experience and Discovery
- Secure user research: We can explore your current user base, which demographic groups, communities and geographic areas are over and under-represented, how tools work in specific contexts, and how your organization can best reach specific communities. This may involve interviews, focus groups, journey and systems mapping, as well as audience and early adopter mappings.
- Exploratory research: We can work with you to further understand the needs of a specific community in relation to a particular context, time, type of threat or harm to their internet freedom that could potentially be addressed by technology development.
- User testing and feedback: We can develop user testing and feedback sessions that can inform platform design decisions and help you better understand those using your tool.
- Support in designing sustainable user feedback flows: We can design sustainable and meaningful feedback systems for the communities most in need of your products and services.
How to receive support
You can learn more about the UXD Lab on their website and apply directly for support from The Engine Room via the UXD Lab Support Request form.
If you have any questions regarding your project’s eligibility (or anything else), please feel free to contact us directly! Just send a mail to uxdlab@theengineroom.org.