Team Memebers : Three
Design Tools : Sketch,Illustrator
Duration : 8 hours
My Role :
UX Designer
My Responsibilities
- Defining the scope and strategy for the project
- Conducting Research from online sources
- Designing the Journey map
- Prepared low fidelity prototypes
- Presented the idea to the judges
Background
Challenge : Design an experience for disaster relief
The project was a challenge given to us as a part of a Uxathon organized by UXPA @Pratt Institute.We secured second position in the Uxathon.
Approach : We divided our users into four main groups - adults,
children, physically challenged and pets and took pets as the main
user for designing the physical and digital product. We did some
online research,synthesized our research in a journey map, designed
wireframes for our product and in the end proposed the idea to the judges
through a 10 minute presentation.
The Problem:
As a team of three we were given the task to design a digital and physical product to help in disaster management or disaster relief.
Vision:
In order to address the above problem I thought to take the following steps:
Goal #1 To Understand the problems of the users who have faces a disaster like hurricane, fire etc.
Goal #2 Synthesize the resultsfrom the user study and take one problems and find a solution for it.
Goal #3 Building a physical product for the problem.
Goal #4 Creating a digital product for the problem and making it functional.
Implementation:
Goal #1: Understanding the problems of the user who have faced a disaster
In order to understand the user we did some research on types of disaster and found that flooding is the No.1 Natural disaster in USA.
As I have faced the Harvey Hurricane in 2017 therefore both my team members interviewed me and we found some pain points faced during the disaster.
- Lack of resources.
- Lack of communication.
- Shelter for evacuation.
- Education of what to do and not to do during a disaster.
After finding these pain points we divided the target users in four groups.
We did a lot of research on finding facts from trustworthy source and we found that of all the users in the group pet are vulnerable in flood or hurricane.
Learning #1 It is always better to divide the user in different groups like we divided into four groups and then tackle the pain points of each user separately.
Goal #2: Taking one user which is important is vulnerable in the disaster and addressing the pain point respectively.
Once we were done with the research we found decide to take pets as the target user and work on the pain points. For this we decided to do journey mapping and tried to understand the problem in depth.
Learning #2 Journey mapping is the best technique to get to the depth of the problem as one is able to know problems at each stage of the process.
Goal #3: Building the physical product
We started to build a physical product as we already had a lot of options in mind during our research. We thought to then combine our physical product with the digital product. We build a prototype of the physical product which was a glow band which the users can connect with an app which we were about to create in our next process.
Next was to give a name to our product
and app so we all did some quick
brainstorming and I came with the name
of havepet ( haven+pet) and we decided on
the logo with a curved H letter and the footprints of the paw.
Learning #3 Building our digital product first gave us more clarity of how we can even connect this product with an app and also gave us the idea to sell this product through our app.
Goal #4: Creating a digital product
From the journey map we found that there were four problems
- Know their pets needs and behaviour before the disaster.
- Keep a track of the pets when sending them in the shelter
- Reunion with their pet and a chat option to know if others need help for their pet or if you have your pet giving them an option to connect with someone where you can adopt a pet
- To educate and help during, before and after the disaster.
Learning #4 There is no one solution for the problem but we should address the most important problem and look at the priority i.e which problem needs to be addressed first and work accordingly.
Learnings from Uxathon:
There were a lot things that I learnt during the process. Summarizing a few of them here:
- As all this had to be done in 8 hours we had to divide the work equally among the team members so that we are able to finish it as a team.
- When designing in short time we cannot be detail oriented but we can just show 2-3 main features in details.
- One has to be focused it is very important to spend time in research as this will give more clarity when we come to the stage of final design.