MVP scoping · User group prioritisation · Evidence synthesis
An acquiring organisation needed to understand what had been built before committing to a rebuild.
The platform had been in development for five years across three products, serving over 4,000 practitioners and community health workers across South Africa. Drawing on five years of accumulated UX research, qualitative fieldwork, and data analysis, I documented six evidence workstream documents in preparation for the synthesis: product analytics, CHW platform analytics, usability test synthesis, qualitative research synthesis, user support query analysis, and Google Analytics data.
The acquiring organisation needed to know what was working, what wasn't, which users to design for first, what the MVP should and should not include, and where the evidence gaps were that required further research before design could begin. I synthesised the six evidence documents into a recommendations document.
Defined the practitioner-level problem.
The acquiring organisation had articulated the sector-level problem well but was less developed on what practitioners themselves needed the platform to solve. The research pointed to two persistent unresolved issues across every engagement from 2020 to 2026: financial instability and professional isolation.
Made user group prioritisation explicit, with tradeoffs.
The new platform's stated scope covered parents, CHWs, practitioners, principals, administrators, coaches, NGOs, and government. Attempting to design for all of them in a 3 to 4 month MVP window would produce a platform that served none of them well. I proposed a clear prioritisation:
The available evidence base is strongest here and the platform is only useful to all upstream users if practitioners actually enter data.
Next phase: coaches Coaches are a potentially meaningful mechanism for practitioner adoption at scale, and the most digitally confident user group in our usability data. In practice, the three white-label organisations we worked with did not prioritise coaching features and uptake was minimal. One organisation has since indicated interest. Organisational appetite needs to be confirmed before investing in design and build.
A competing platform was already in use in some provincial health departments and may become the national standard for CHW data capture. Building a parallel tool risked duplicating infrastructure. The right move was to understand that landscape, and potential partnership opportunities, before making any rebuild commitment.
A parent-facing product is a distinct use case requiring its own discovery research before any design work begins. Scoping that into a 3–4 month build window alongside the practitioner platform would not leave enough time to do it properly.
These groups depend on practitioner data existing in the system first. Build the foundation before the superstructure.
Recommended a narrow MVP against pressure for breadth.
The pattern across the platform's history was consistent: broad launch scope had contributed to drop-off and re-engagement problems across all three products. A bad first experience is permanent in this user population. I recommended choosing one of two primary value propositions for the MVP — community and peer connection, or financial instability support — and building the other into a subsequent phase.
Defined the research agenda for unresolved gaps.
The evidence base was strong on usability, feature preference, and adoption patterns. What it didn't resolve: what would make a financially stuck practitioner find the platform worth opening daily beyond content; whether the community mechanic could be improved beyond what existing social tools already offer; and why high-conversion cohorts still dropped off at the same rate after setup. I designed a specific research protocol for each gap, grounded in questions focused on concrete past behaviour rather than stated preferences.
A 2,500-word recommendations document structured to be actionable: