Showcasing research around the digital lives of women in Nigeria, Kenya, and Senegal

Digital Personas is the result of a Gates Foundation–supported study conducted by Quicksand & Stby. It explores how digital tools and services intersect with and impact the lives of women across Nigeria, Kenya, and Senegal:

Digital Personas shows how women actually use digital in context, not just in metrics. It combines qualitative insight with population-level data to support more grounded decisions about where digital works, and how it should be designed.

To present their findings, the researchers wanted a website that could hold comparative, multi-region data and offer different ways of looking at the insights while remaining easy to explore.

Miranj came on board as the web development partner, with Nitin Garg handling the site’s visual design¹. Design and development ran in parallel, with the website built on Craft CMS.

Flexible Dashboards, Annotated Narratives

The core of the website is a comparative dashboard that lets visitors scan across Personas and spot patterns at a glance. The challenge: the research data is heterogeneous. Different indicators need different treatments — metrics, pie charts, qualitative insights, pathway segments — and these vary across personas and countries.

Rather than hardcoding a pre-decided structure, we gave the client the ability to define their own. They can compose dashboard columns, assign a visualisation type to each field, merge columns with similar content, and mix data types freely — all from within the CMS, without touching any code. This keeps the presentation flexible and the research team fully in control of how findings are displayed.

Findings for each Persona are also presented individually, accompanied by profiles of some of the women represented within the Persona. These story pages support inline annotations, letting authors surface additional context without interrupting the reading flow.

The result at design​with​dp​.org pairs a high-level comparative dashboard with deeper individual persona narratives, giving the research the range it needs to reach practitioners, policymakers, and designers alike.