My Role

Lead UX Designer
Researcher

The team

15 students, 9 countries, 1 mission.
Sponsored by Google Search.

Overview

Google’s Search Team collaborated with SCADpro to develop concepts for local and global crisis response. I was initially attracted to this project given that my home country, Honduras, is a hotspot for hurricanes. I wanted to help develop a project that could bring together communities in their most vulnerable states.

The problem.

How might we enable local communities to organize and help each other in times of crisis?

Constraints

  • Entry point should be through Google Search.
  • The product needs to be useful before, during, and after the crisis.
  • Focus should be on hurricane disasters

Initial research.

The team conducted 42 user interviews of students, locals and non-locals. We reached out to nine organizations, icluding CEMA (Chatham Emergency Management Agency) and the Savannah Animal Shelter, to hear from workers and volunteers operating during hurricane crisis.

Key Insights

Behavior and Emotion

People support each other emotionally during crisis. They found themselves most stressed when alone and communities support each other when going through the same trauma.

Organizations

Donations are crucial for a successful relief program. People want to help others in need but don't know where to donate or what to donate.

Resources

Those who were prepared for a natural disaster had resources to spare, vs. those who were not had a higher chance to become ill.

Archetypes

We laid out our interviewees on a mindset matrix. We found that are users are on a spectrum of apathetic, distressed, people person, and individualist when in crisis. We realized that we were designing with extreme cases in mind and the majority of our target users fell in the middle.

Preliminary Concepts

Connect

Connect utilizes Google's existing platforms to match people to others in their community based on needs and resources. The goal is for communities to share resources and support each other through in person interactions.

Raise

Raise provides diverse channels for donations. Users can raise funds by watching ads, playing games, or by making a monetary donation.

Community

Raises awareness by sharing and viewing crisis stories in your community.

The solution.

A set of features living in Google search that allow users to donate either time or money to verified relief programs, post pictures and videos of what's happening around your community, and raise awareness of natural disasters occurring around the world.

Donate

Organizations set monetary goals and relief programs that can be found in Google search. Google facilitates the donation process by allowing users to watch ads that will turn into monetary donations or by directly donating money.

Stories

Stories allows users in crisis to document the events around them and alerts others of the natural disaster. Users not experiencing the crisis are given a first person perspective of what is going on.

Explore

Explore gives users a platform to discover what is going on around the world.

Want to learn more?
This project is currently under NDA. If you want to learn more about it, shoot me an email!