A case study coauthored by:
Emma Ungureanu, Vladimir Căruntu and Radu Tudorie.
The Food Security Portal (FSP) is a web page facilitated by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) that presents up-to-date information about developments in the world food system. IFPRI’s role is to research innovative ways of managing food, water, and land, and the results of their work form the basis of the information made public on the Portal, including food price changes, food security alerts, and food crises in developing countries.
In 2020, IFPRI partnered with Vitamin Software to revamp the Food Security Portal, on both the front-end and the back-end side, with the goal of improving its usability, strengthening privacy and security measures, and increasing traffic to the website.
The results of the partnership between IFPRI and Vitamin include an improved user experience, a more efficient information architecture, up-to-date software, and strong GDPR compliance.
About IFPRI’s Food Security Portal
The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) is one of the fifteen independent research centers of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). CGIAR’s mission is to deliver science and innovation that advance the transformation of food, land, and water systems in a climate crisis, and IFPRI plays an essential role in this endeavor. IFPRI’s research generates high-quality results that form the basis for policies aimed at sustainably reducing poverty and ending hunger and malnutrition at national, regional, and global levels.
To provide the research and policy-making community with up-to-date information about developments in the world food system, IFPRI has facilitated the Food Security Portal (FSP), a website that provides key data to monitor food security situations and food prices in real time. The FSP is used by governments and policymakers to respond to the risks presented by food crises and to increase resilience to these risks, especially in developing countries.
“The Food Security Portal, facilitated by IFPRI with support from the European Commission, provides open access to comprehensive, country-level information on food security issues and policy developments around the world.”
The Challenges of FSP
The Food Security Portal makes key data available to organizations interested in monitoring food security situations. As one of IFPRI’s essential assets, the FSP’s main requirement is for the stable and secure underlying software. IFPRI’s priority was to update Drupal, the web content management framework behind the Food Security Portal, to a newer, supported version to ensure the website is protected against all dangers.
Another of IFPRI’s top concerns was for the Portal to comply with data privacy regulations. Because the Portal is regularly accessed by users from the European Union, IFPRI had to tighten the measures taken to secure personal data collected by the FSP, in accordance with GDPR requirements.
Third among IFPRI’s objectives for the FSP was to increase traffic on the website. The most straightforward way to spark the interest of the food security community and bring them to the Portal was to ensure the tools provided are useful for the desired end users.
Finally, IFPRI wanted its FSP team to be able to operate the Portal, so the vendor had to ensure a smooth handover of the operations to the in-house team. This meant that any implementation had to be streamlined and documented in order to facilitate the training of the IFPRI staff.
Why IFPRI Chose Vitamin to Revamp FSP
You could say it takes a village to give a website a makeover, but in reality, all it takes is to find the right team. Then it’s all smooth sailing from there. We at Vitamin Software have the full package, and this played a decisive role in forming a partnership with IFPRI to revamp the Food Security Portal. We bring a mix of skills to the table that made us a one-stop-shop for IFPRI’s needs. Our team has the necessary experience to cover all the areas where the Portal needed improvement: information architecture, front-end, back-end, and infrastructure. To round everything out, we had IFPRI’s trust that we are a team of professionals based on our prior partnership on other technical projects.
Vitamin put its CKAN expertise to good use on this project so that we could offer IFPRI an easy way to publish, share, and work with data. Data is the backbone of the Food Security Portal, so being able to operate a powerful data management system like CKAN was a must.
Speaking of data, Vitamin had prior experience with interactive visualization, especially with presenting information on maps. In our case study about our partnership with Fraym, we explain how we built dataFraym - a user-friendly map-based application that our client took from MVP to Product-Market Fit.
From data to visualization, we then open the door for our juiciest skill: business analysis. We put our strengths to good use and understand the end user before improving any product. Our analytical skills help us ask the right questions and find the true needs, while our communication skills allow us to always be in tune with the customer. The result is consumer-oriented-design, helping the product reach critical mass quickly.
"I am impressed by the quality of services that we received from Vitamin Software. Vitamin Software was right on schedule, charged reasonable prices, was professional and courteous in dealings, and had great project management and communications. The revamped Food Security Portal website was successfully launched on time. This plays an important role in achieving the project goals. We recommend Vitamin Software and its development team.
We look forward to working with them on future projects."
— Soonho Kim, Senior Data Manager, IFPRI
Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way: The Solution
With IFPRI’s clear list of requirements combined with the nebulous task of increasing traffic on the Food Security Portal, we knew that the project wouldn’t be a walk in the park. But we put our thinking caps on and devised a plan with multiple phases, tackling each problem head-on.
On the front-end side, we combined technologies with domain best practices to increase traffic by providing useful information in an user-friendly way:
Typography-driven design - We came up with a very clean layout and design to make sure that the content of the site will be emphasized instead of the design per se. The design features large titles, a subtle color scheme based on shades of gray, and maximized content typeface to make for a pleasant and easy reading experience;
Sketch Cloud - An online platform used to align expectations and collect feedback on the design process, thus reducing friction; it also gave the developers extended information on properties for visual elements like sizes, spacing, colors, and typefaces;
Bootstrap - An open source styling framework is at the base of the front-end to ensure consistency in structuring the design;
SVGs and an Icon Font Kit - As a subtle visual support for the typography-driven design, ensuring icons look crisp on any device;
Color usage - Colors were used sparingly to make sure that when they do show up, they make an impact on the user experience. This allowed us, for example, to easily get a clear distinction between the main portal (uses teal as a primary color for buttons, links, etc.) and the sub-portals (Africa South of the Sahara sub-portal uses gold as a primary color);
Highcharts - A JavaScript library used to create interactive charts and visualizations for the FSP portal; we also used Highcharts in CKAN data visualization pages to dynamically represent the dataset the users are viewing.
The difference between the old and the new look and feel of the portal is proof that we helped make the FSP more user-friendly and also more attractive:
Screenshot of the initial FSP homepage
Screenshot of the redesigned FSP homepage
To prove the FSP is not just a pretty face, we used a stable technology stack in the back-end:
Drupal - A powerful open source web content management framework, with lots of modules available, making it easy for the FSP team to add content down the line;
CKAN – We leveraged this irresistible data management system’s data sharing and visualization features and its search capabilities;
CKAN API - We extended its functionality by creating custom MySQL data harvesters that automatically update (every 30 minutes) 14000+ datasets published on CKAN that are of interest to FSP users;
Drupal modules - We created modules that are querying the CKAN API in real time to present commodity prices on the FSP website;
Robotic Process Automation - We employed an innovative data migration method to move data between the old and the new portal automatically.
Media Analysis of Food Prices, provides an intuitive interface designed to help users easily identify co-occurrences between COVID-19-related terms and relevant food security-related terms.
Results and Benefits
By partnering with Vitamin Software to redesign the Food Security Portal, IFPRI has seen both immediate and long-term results that have increased the traffic on the portal.
The first direct outcome was the beautiful user interface, which sparks the users’ interest and convinces them to stay on the website. A good design goes a long way toward keeping your audience engaged.
We improved the information architecture to make the most of the datasets. Together with a robust data management system, this allows for easier sharing, fast synchronization, with the database, and sleek visualizations.
The Portal’s privacy and security are on point after we upgraded the software components and strengthened the FSP’s compliance with GDPR.
The cherry on top is that all this is in IFPRI’s control. We provided clear documentation and training for the FSP team to enable them to modify and create content on the Portal with minimal assistance from our team.
Next Steps
After getting a taste of what it’s like to have a successful product, IFPRI plans to continue the collaboration with Vitamin. The next step is to take the Portal to the next level. This will be done by implementing a powerful search capability on the Portal, which will improve content accessibility. Users will be able to search for and find relevant content easily, which will lead to a further increase in website traffic.
Of course, security is still IFPRI’s top priority, so we will work together to upgrade CKAN to the latest version to ensure the Food Security Portal remains stable and secure. Vitamin will also provide emergency support to ensure operational efficiency.
About Vitamin Software
A product development agency, Vitamin Software specializes in building your product and supporting it until it finds product-market fit. The customer leads and we drive the product to follow.
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