FRIEND IN DEED
Mobile App Design to aid in disaster relief.
THE CHALLENGE
How can we make giving and receiving help easier and more effective before, during, and after a disaster?
Our team was tasked with addressing the many pain points of disaster relief to create an MVP mobile app to help with peer to peer giving and receiving for future disasters.
THE APPROACH
There are many ways to help those in a disaster and many organizations already helping. Our approach is to identify our unique value proposition in the complex system of disaster management.
In order to understand the landscape of disaster management, we will utilize a vast network of experts and dive into existing literature and technology. Once we understand our unique position in the landscape and the added value we can bring our users, we can begin to develop the framework for our mobile app design.
CASE STUDY IN PROGRESS
FRIEND IN DEED
Applying design thinking to solve complex social & community problems surround disaster relief.
A friend in need
is a friend in deed.
USER INTERVIEWS
As someone with first-hand experience with those in the disaster relief community, one of our first steps was to arrange user interviews. We interviewed disaster relief experts, volunteers, and survivors to gather insight on those giving or receiving aid. We also wrote a survey and distributed it to a Facebook group using peer to peer giving.
We also used the comments and messages of a peer to peer Facebook group to form and validate key data points. Then we compiled our interview, survey and Facebook data and mapped our key data points.
PERSONAS
Developing high-level personas was a challenge for this project. We found that our personas often crossed roles from survivor to giver and perhaps blended into an organization leader at times as well. We have come to think of our personas as a mind-set and have to revisit the concept often.
CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP
Our team wanted to journey with our Radical Giver primary persona and envision how they might move through a given disaster. We found that a person would probably find one area or stage of a disaster to invest in and that the journey would be similar in the after disaster stages.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Emergency Management
Our dedicated researcher dove into literature review to understand the complex world of emergency management and brief our team. This was an essential step to make sure we were able to integrate well with the professionals that work in the emergency management complex.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Our researcher analyzed 45 organizations in the space who fulfill many of the same needs.
The help app for disaster relief is an existing concept that is similar to ours, so how would we differentiate ourselves in the market?
VALUE PROPOSITION
Our unique value in the market is our peer to peer sharing concept in the disaster relief landscape. As a team, we spent time defining our core values moving forward.
BUILDING TRUST
&
COMMUNITY
Ensuring Safety
+
Enabling Choice & Action
+
Encouraging Accountability
KEY THEMES
Helping friends & neighbors
Sharing resources
Understanding needs
Being reliable
VALUE PROPOSITION
Building communities by using trusted networks to assess and allocate resources during a disaster.
PAIN POINTS
In the discovery phase, we idenitified some major pain points that we wanted to address in the peer to peer disaster relief app that many of our user interviews and experienced professionals have dealt with in their communities.
• Validation of Needs • Duplication of Efforts • Lack of Follow Through
TASK ANALYSIS
Validating Identity
Asking for Help
Understanding Needs
Coordinating
Help
Showing
Gratitude
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS & AFFORDANCES
As we wrapped up our research phase we realized that the direct competition in disaster relief did not provide the insights we needed to begin to ideate on the type of peer to peer interactions that we wanted to implement into our mobile app. However, there are many peer to peer apps that use these type of community and social interactions very successfully. Our researcher went to work once again to guide us to some excellent peer to peer examples to set us up for our design sprint.
DESIGN SPRINT
As I led the UX team into the ideation phase of the project, I chose to do a modified design sprint focused on the defined pain points and affordances we outlined in the research phase. We did not have 5 full-time dedicated days so I modified the sprint to timed sketching and sharing sessions focused on each task. We did 2 tasks each session with sharing, voting and collaborating at the end of each one.
Fun Warm Up!
This team has GREAT ideas! We did a fun, old school camp style game called "Zip, Zap, Zop" at the start of the session to get everyone loosened up and ready to have fun with the design process.
*use access password
Crazy Concepting
This is a modified version of Crazy 8's. We broke up the Sprint into 6 concepts that we wanted to ideate on and conducted mini-sprints / solution sketching. The goal is to generate as many ideas as possible within a short timeframe, focusing on quantity of ideas not quality, and then once you’ve got a bunch of divergent thinking on each topic, to begin converging on some winning ideas by voting on the favorites.
Crazy Concept #1 - Validation / Security
Crazy Concept #3 - Giver Initiation
Crazy Concept #2 - Needs Assessment
Crazy Concept #4 - Accountability
Crazy Concept #5 - Coordinating Needs
Crazy Concept #6 - Showing Gratitude
IN PROGRESS
Our team is continuing the work on this project. The next steps include developing wireframes and simple prototypes for validation testing with our primary and secondary user groups across different types of disasters and regions.
CASE STUDY IN PROGRESS