Clink allows people to ask questions, share information, and trade resources before and during crisis events, building community resilience through location based chat.
Disaster in this monsoon season - 2018 Kerala Floods
Problem
While one cannot do much to alter a natural calamity, humanity usually wins over any disaster. People go out of the way to help each other, organisations take up rescue and rebuilding work, doctors provide free help, so on and so forth.
In situations like this, on one side there are several people who face life threatening challenges like shortage of food, medical emergencies, hygiene issues; on the other side there are groups of volunteers ready to help the people in need.
In the past few years natural disasters have claimed over millions of lives. However, most people are unprepared to handle a natural disaster. In this project I explored the opportunities to help people better respond to natural disasters by connecting the help seekers and the volunteers.
How do I support survivor coordination during the next natural disaster?
In some of the large scale events, effectively coordinating relief efforts is essential to minimise injury, effective evacuation, and aiding neighbouring survivors.
PEOPLE
Floods survivors
ACTION
Response coordination effort
CONTEXT
Kerala Floods
Kerala is in the midst of an unprecedented flood havoc. The calamity has caused immeasurable misery and devastation. Many lives were lost. Hundreds of homes were totally destroyed and many more were damaged. For the first time in history, 27 dams in the State had to be opened. Never before had the State witnessed a calamity of this scale. In the fight against the flood, we have braved the odds.
Research
My initial research focused in on floods and earthquakes. I knew our initial scope would need to be significantly narrowed. However, I found that floods had few distinguishing factors compared to other large natural disasters when it comes to their effects on society. It made sense to then broaden my scope before narrowing it by looking at natural disasters as a whole, and to understand the phases of emergency management. My research strategy was to broadly cover as much ground as possible while keeping in mind that I would need enough depth of information to narrow in on a specific user group and issue.
My initial research questions:
What happens after a natural disaster?
How do individuals and organisations respond?
What are the current issues in disaster management?
I waded through a massive amount of articles, case studies, frameworks, spoke to a few responders who are actively working on the ground and a variety of experts with knowledge pertinent to disaster management, and examined a number of current solutions. The interviews I conducted with experts, volunteers, and responders, were especially helpful in answering my research questions.
• Major natural disasters can have a significant effect on infrastructure
• Communities that rely on just-in-time inventory will have to undergo rapid changes to meet basic needs
• After a natural disaster government agencies focus on mitigation of further loss by overseeing operations from a high level and managing and allocating resources
• From the organisational level situational awareness is limited and decisions are made based on the known problems rather than helping those most in need
• Due to differences in operational processes and issues of liability, government organisations and volunteers do not commonly work together
I also observed that volunteers and citizens in communities impacted by natural disasters can be an incredible and reliable resource after a disaster. In situations when infrastructure damage has isolated communities, local citizens are often the only ones that can help.
Key findings
• One of the only guarantees after a natural disaster is that survivors and volunteers will come together to help each other out.
Locals are more suited to respond than governments and external relief organisations because of their knowledge of the area or specialised skills
• Even though people want to help, and are capable of doing so, sometimes they don’t have the right information to do so effectively
• People improvise and use everyday digital tools that they have used before in response efforts. They do not use disaster specific solutions
Disaster experience map
With the help of UX researchers I can also visualise and combine my research to create an experience map showing what happens after a natural disaster, how key players are involved, and what infrastructure is likely available. I can get more insights into personal, external volunteers, govt., police, fire, organisations, infrastructure, and communication behaviour with activity priorities and their availability mapped against time.
Key Insights
1. One of the only guarantees after a natural disaster is that survivors and volunteers will come together to help each other out
2. Communities need to have the ability to operate and collaborate within the group, which are usually in plenty
3. The best solutions are the ones that people have already used before a disaster
Competitive analysis
Ideation
At the end of sketching, I generated a few ideas. I then organised, grouped, and combined the ideas into design. Also, evaluated the ideas based on strength, feasibility, and novelty. Some of the concepts I considered included:
• Volunteer donation system
• Skill sharing organisation
• Evacuation planning and infrastructure
• Situational awareness
• Volunteer organisation
I narrowed down my concept directions to either a system to share skills or share resources. A deeper evaluation will reveal better insights like, Which concept would be more successful prior to a disaster? Which concept had the greater positive impact on survivors?
I could agree that the local communication and collaboration, a core function of both of these concepts, was closer to the core problem that we were interested in solving.
Prototyping
There are obvious difficulties prototyping a solution in the context of a natural disaster as we can't recreate the likely emotional, psychological, and needs based stress involved in the wake of a natural disaster.
I prototyped a discussion among people, working towards a hype-local communication product for collaborative work, I had several design goals that were especially critical.
1. Privacy and Trust
This phase is to evaluate the balance between information that people are comfortable disclosing and information that is required to evaluate trustworthiness. I presented participants with example profile pages with varying levels of information and asked them to rate the profile’s trustworthiness based on a variety of actions.
Findings
• Information about mutual friends can build trust, and sharing this information does not compromise privacy
• Sharing a person’s current location is not useful for building trust and is a privacy concern as well
2. Collaborative Tools
This helped me evaluate how to improve resource and information sharing within a local community & where do existing tools fall short in collaborative decision making
Findings
• When groups are planning around a shared activity, there are lots of small decisions that need to be addressed
• These decisions can be tedious to address and find group consensus using verbal communication
3. Proximity and Group Formation
This is to evaluate individuals if they feel more comfortable requesting favors from strangers in close proximity to strangers that are further away. Creating multiple slack groups for participants to simulate functionality I had in mind for my design solution.
Findings
• People prefer reaching out to friends and people in their immediate vicinity when asking for help, but they are willing to go beyond this for help in times of crisis
• For information seeking that doesn’t require meeting in person, participants did not necessarily prefer friends to strangers
Design
Clink mobile application should be accessible to as many people as possible. One of my main concerns with a mobile solution was access to infrastructure. Yet through interviews and secondary research I found that cellular networks are surprisingly resilient. Also, the Bluetooth technology included in most phones can be leveraged as a fall-back to connect devices when cellular connectivity is compromised.
The solution is a mobile communication application designed to support survivors in an environment before and during a crisis events. Clink allows people to ask questions and share resources, building community resilience through location based chat.
In the wireframing process I explored a few different interaction models, which is later simplified and combined.
Design principles
Clink is conceptualised around six design principles established from the research.
• Providing real-time information about your surroundings - Map based discussions
Disaster survivors who had difficulty knowing which stores were open to get the supplies they needed. Clink information discussion groups are location specific groups for crowd-sourcing information. Nearby information groups can be viewed in either the list or map views. A combination search and add new input field is designed to aid in rapidly finding information while reducing duplicate discussions. Since Information Discussions are location specific, the participants in the thread are all local to the inquiry helping to reduce irrelevant and incorrect information.
Digital prototyping
• Streamlining organisational process - Lists feature
Although people come together to volunteer and offer aid in times of crisis, they often do so in a disorganised fashion. This can result in extreme mismatches of donations to need in type and quantity of donations.
In the List Feature screen the chat input field has been repurposed to enter new items to the list. A swipe left on the item requests it, while a right swipe will mark a contribution. A dialogue to enter the quantity is shown for both requests and contributions.
• Reduction of irrelevant, incorrect, and repeat information - Pin messages to avoid clutter
The pinned message toggle is prominently placed at the top right of the screen. When the toggle is switched on, non-pinned items are animated away and the pinned items are compressed into a short list.
• Support of varying availability of technology
Clink has a SMS interface. New messages are sent via text and the application can be interacted with special text based commands.
• Versatility to everyday use
Clink is at its core designed for natural disaster response, but also with day to day utility as well.
Clink’s location based chat groups are not limited in anyway to disaster specific applications, meaning groups can be created as people see fit. In the above example is a group for dog owners. This type of flexibility is necessary to help build a user base and ultimately encourage Clink’s use for disaster scenarios as well.
• Fostering a community of trust and positivity - Trust and privacy
During our profile prototyping activity, we found that mutual friends and groups were important in establishing trust with a stranger. In our secondary research we found that trust can be defined as the inverse of risk. By sharing this information with the public, we assume that privacy is protected and the opportunity for interaction increases.
The user profiles page use the actual first name of a user. Our test participants generally felt that first name and profile images were safe to share with the public. Individuals can also receive thanks for good deeds and helpful information.
Outcome
Process
My key insights were based on a breadth of research techniques. A few influential were talking with subject matter experts and a review of how people responded to previous natural disasters. I analysed some activities and prototyping to understand supplies and collaboration, location-specific communication, privacy and trust. These led to maps and list features.
Location based communication
From the research I know that reducing external noise is key to gaining situational awareness, so I created the maps feature as a way to provide locally sourced real time information to users within a small defined area.
Collaborative lists
From my research activity I found that planning with the shared list of supplies is more efficient than with verbal or text based communication. Clink's collaborative lists feature allows people to claim responsibility by swiping an item and marking quantities. I see this being very useful to inform donors of what is needed and prevent oversupply or unnecessary items. Both the lists and maps features were designed to be useful for day to day and crisis activities.
Intelligent fallbacks
Although cell networks are surprisingly resilient in the wake of natural disasters, sometimes they fail or become overloaded. Clink can fall back on to a Bluetooth mesh network which allows direct communication between phones in close proximity. Clink can also have the ability to hibernate to conserve power and wake up to transmit information at coordinated time intervals.
Project Plan
Assets - Exporting components & elements to build
Collaboration between researchers, designers & developers is often very important in bringing out the product to it’s best. In order to simplify the tasks further, I run some scripts on adobe tools post digital prototyping, validation & testing for developers to build the app. I can anytime customise this code to my requirement.
To generate Mobile app Strings, I maintain a common strings text file for both Android and iOS, for the uniformity of the texts used throughout the app. To generate these .XML and .strings file, I use a File extractor .JAR tool with slight modifications to fit my requirements to get the required output in different formats for both Android and iOS. I can also provide design specs for building the product.
Testing, usability & analytics
Sometimes I measure the level of user satisfaction and collect feedback about the product through a survey. This is a quick way to collect information from a large number of users but their obvious limitation is lack of any interaction between the researcher and the users.
Usability helps the product team identify the issues and work towards a solution. Usually a UX designer should focus primarily on the findings and recommendations that are differentiated by levels of severity and if required I change the way interactions are designed.
Analytics tool will provide numbers on how the user interacts with the product: clicks, user session time, search queries etc. Analytics report can also “uncover the unexpected”, surfacing behaviours that aren’t explicit in user tests.
“ A good team work, and collaboration with teams of designers, researchers, engineers & product managers throughout the design process is the key to achieve goals ”
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