Hurricane Preparedness

For Social Good

This project revolved around creating an application and then scaled up website of a hurricane preparedness app that would allow users to learn about hurricanes, complete emergency checklists, review emergency resources, review the upcoming forecast, volunteer, and donate to hurricane relief funds.

Roles and Responsibilities

For this project I was the full UX designer and my responsibilities included competitive analyses, user research, usability studies, paper & digital wireframing, low & high-fidelity prototyping, and iterating on designs

Users Front And Center

To understand the users who would be best served by application and accompanying website I conducted user interviews to find out what users care about when it comes to hurricane preparedness and learning. The primary user group for this was those who live in hurricane prone areas and want a better site that combines resources & learning materials.

Through this research I learned that a lot of people turn more towards mobile apps & sites in times of crisis perhaps due to damage of their homes or lack of power to access desktop sites.

Let's Get Crazy...Eights

With the concept and users in mind I was able to come up with the start of my ideas for the application that would grow from app to web. Using the Crazy Eights technique I was able to iterate on some design ideas to start with.

Iterate and Repeat

Initially I found it was important to focus on the ability for users to have all of their resources available on the home screen but be capable of navigating to other screens quickly.

As I continued to iterate and begin to scale up my designs I recognized early designs were void of color or text so users were left somewhat confused on how to properly utilize the application. After taking time to understand the colors, fonts, and images I would use users were better able to understand the full app experience.

Scaling Up And Down

With the understanding that this was not just going to be an app but a responsive website, I had to design various methods for display and figure out the arrangement of items on the site so they could scale up and down.

Make It Fly

With some final touches I put more thought into the high-fidelity prototype and how users would step through the website in comparison to how the application I previously designed functioned.

Takeaways and Next Steps

Throughout the course of this study I learned that it’s important to keep your users front of mind while not trying to go overboard with complex designs. Sometimes simplicity can provide the better user experience when it comes to an app / website that users will use to learn & protect themselves.

As I continue to iterate I will be conducting additional competitive analyses to understand how other websites take the approach to education & safety as well as obtaining user feedback that can lead into better iterations on designs.