• Timeline: December 2020 - May 2021 (6 months)

• Responsibilities:

  • Participatory community research

  • Product strategy and vision

  • User experience design

• Constraints:

  • Stakeholder & partner buy-in

  • Internet access and tech literacy

  • Security of data management

  • Travel restrictions

• Team:

  • 1 UX designer (me)

  • 1 product design lead

  • 1 data science lead

  • 1 governance lead

  • 1 community manager

  • 3 community partners

What is the current state of disaster management in Puerto Rico?

DISCOVERY

“Social capital — individual and community networks — have proven to be a vital capacity for coping and adapting to shocks from disasters.” — Jasmine Qin, Founder of Re+connect

When I joined the team, I conducted a literature review to get a better understanding of the problem space and the people of Puerto Rico. 

I learned that while hurricanes touch virtually all segments of the population on the island, poor older adults, children, individuals with disabilities or chronic illnesses, and women are disproportionately affected by disasters in Puerto Rico. These residents usually live alone and/or in rural areas. For this reason, they may need to rely on disaster relief services without access to reliable communication channels, and often need to lean on neighbors and social connections.

PERSONAS

Personas were developed to understand the challenges and motivations of residents, community ambassadors, community groups, and humanitarian aid agencies. While it’s difficult to design a solution for every situation (as there are many tasks that need to be done to maintain communities), our personas helped us focus on the key problems and mindsets that could help our users build disaster resilience together.

JOBS TO BE DONE

We synthesized our research by identifying the jobs to be done of each user group. This helped us understand how each user group completed tasks in their current situation and how much each of these groups depends on one another to achieve tasks.

How might we organize community data among three interconnected groups to achieve common goals for preparation and response of natural disasters?

GATHERING REQUIREMENTS

I collaborated with my product manager, research team, and other key stakeholders to gain a clear understanding of our technical capacity, legal requirements, and business goals. We imagined how our findings could help us create a seamless user experience across each user group.

We believed that by designing three user interfaces grounded in four common goals (core solutions), we could create key touchpoints that help build disaster resilience through connection, collaboration, and coordination across each user group.

COMPETITOR ANALYSIS

In the initial project kickoff, I learned of a few competitors: people-powered surveys, HOT, Needslist, and Crowd Rescue HQ. Ushahidi and New York Cares are also organizations identified as direct competitors in further conversations with the team. I conducted a competitor analysis to assess re+connect’s positioning in the market.

USE CASE DOCUMENTATION

Documenting use case requirements (48 use cases total across three user groups) helped us prioritize core use cases that would make the most impact in our users’ lives.

This also revealed gaps in the current experience and areas beyond our current technological capacity that need to be solved for in the future. Since we were building the product from the ground up, we kept our long-term goals in mind while scoping out what the product will and will not solve for at this early adoption stage.

CREATING CONNECTIONS

SERVICE BLUEPRINT & INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Cross-functional workshops with the team and stakeholders gave everyone a chance to hear from our users. We built a service blueprint to imagine how our service can provide support for what users need to get done.

Interactive co-design sessions helped us ideate and understand user flows and mental models, which we used to define the information architecture of each interface. A few user cases were determined to be outside of our scope at this stage to help the team better focus the design:

• Resident decides to establish a community group

• Community group maintains an inventory of resources

• Agency asks community group to share the status of the resources being used

TASK ASSIGNMENT PROTOTYPE

The following iteration is based on one feedback loop for the product’s core user flows: a community group member creates a task. Click on each image to enlarge.

ITERATION 1.0

ITERATION 2.0

Scaling for global impact

PILOTING THE PROTOTYPE

Re+connect is currently a Stage 1 grant awardee for the 2021 NSF Civic Innovation Challenge. The purpose of the grant is to provide resources to implement the pilot stage of the product and begin testing with real users on the ground in Puerto Rico. As we build toward that goal, we continue to rapidly prototype, test, and refine. The MVP will launch in the summer of 2021.

IMPACT

With a long-term vision for global impact, re+connect aims to first close the disaster relief gap and build long-term resilience for 500,000 people in underserved communities in the most climate disaster-prone and populated regions of the United States:

• On an individual level, it will reduce exposure to harmful effects of disasters with improved services and social engagements.

• On a community level, it will enhance resilience through empowered organizing and access to resources and support.

• On a disaster management level, it will improve efficacy relief efforts with better-informed decisions and enhanced coordination.