Background

During my time at General Assembly in 2017, my team of 2 designers and I were tasked with designing a stand-alone app for FEMA that would assist its users in sending and receiving quick communication, in the event of disasters such as shootings or other attacks. We went to work to design an iOS end-to-end experience of SafeCheck from scratch. We wore the hats of project manager, UI/UX designer, and UX researcher.

What is FEMA?
FEMA is an agency of the United States Department of Homeland security that coordinates responses to disasters that overwhelm the resources of local and state authorities. The functionality of their existing app at the time was limited to setting weather alerts, reading general safety tips, and redirecting users to more information.

FEMA's Goal
To support our citizens and first responders to ensure that as a nation we work together to build, sustain, and improve our capability to prepare for, protect against, respond to, recover from, and mitigate all hazards.

My Role & Project Timeline

I had the opportunity to design and iterate on various parts of the app, but I was mostly in charge of the UX and the research. We had exactly 2 weeks to complete this project.

The Why

Problem Statement
With shootings and other tragedies becoming more prominent(as of research we'd conducted at that time in 2017), people need an efficient way of communicating because these situations always result in confusion, panic, and chaos.

Hypothesis
We hypothesized that a potential solution to this problem could be a mobile app that emphasizes communicating safety to family and friends quickly; providing updates directly to family from FEMA; and connecting people so that they can share information.

Business Opportunities
FEMA is prominent for responding to emergency situations and has a large budget($40.6 billion for 2017) for responding to crises such as amber alerts and weather alerts. FEMA can work with SafeCheck to fascilitate related updates, further emphasizing their mission around working with citizens to provide support and protection.

Market Research

We began by taking a look at what other companies and organizations are doing to address safety issues. Comparing them to what FEMA currently offers helped us identify areas of opportunity.

Looking at the Heuristic Analysis below
We campared the exisiting FEMA app(at the time) against other safety apps like Life360 and Red Cross Emergency app. These other apps were doing a significantly better job with aesthetic design, minimizing users' cognitive load, and using standards that are already familiar to users. 

Preliminary User Research

We sent out a screener survery to identify our target audience. From the responses we received, we conducted: 

• 9 interviews
• Participants were between the ages of 20-40
• 83% preferred texting over calling as a means of communication
• Everyone we interviewed had been in an emergency situation or had a family member/friend who was in an emergency situation.

Our Key Users

The Personas
 

The Emotional Journey
We explored the emotional journey from the perspective of each persona.

Feature Prioritization

Usingthe MoSCoW method, we prioritized particular features over others in terms of what was technically feasible, as well as what would or wouldn't be helpful for the user. 

User Testing and Iteration 

We started out with quick paper sketches in order to explore various ways we could incorporate the above features. We conducted 2 rounds of testing in total. The first round was with the paper sketches. We incoporated the feedback we recevied from the first round and iterated on the desings, with higher fidelity. We then took the high-fidelity iterations back into testing.

Home Screen: Before & After

Profile: Before & After

Connect: Before & After

Updates: Before & After

The Style Guide 

Final Screens

Next Steps 

I'm currently working on the re-design of the visuals for a cleaner and simplified look. Additionally, some time has passed since this app was designed back in 2017. I'm curious to know how similar or not, the results of another round of user testing would be, after the redesign. I plan to conduct one with folks who fit within the target audience, to guage how helpful this app could be today. Afterwards, I'm going to code the app so that it can come to life 🙂