Disaster Aid

Disaster Aid is a web application which enables disaster survivors to request and monitor emergency assistance across federal, state, local, tribal, volunteer and private sector organizations.

Challenge

My goal as a UX Designer on this project was to ensure that the overall experience for this website was exceptional, consistent, and valuable. In alignment with the project’s mission, I aimed to design the new website as an agency-neutral, survivor-centric portal through which disaster survivors could effortlessly request the help they need to rebuild their lives.

Fun fact: I got to share more about this project with Human Factors International shortly after I earned their Certified Usability Analyst (CUA) certification and was named CUA of the Month (July 2016). Go check it out!

Strategy

There was no defined UX strategy in place when I arrived on the scene in mid-2015. The website was already live and very much in use. Much of what I was doing early on was working to keep a good thing going. You know, keeping up appearances, facilitating design sessions, and making small tweaks to the existing interface per client request - that sort of thing.

Strategy was retroactively introduced after the fact when it was determined that user research was attainable and would be beneficial to ongoing design and development initiatives.

A former colleague of mine, Dr. Kayenda Johnson, once entitled a brown-bag presentation "Will the real user PLEASE STAND UP?" after a well-known Eminem song of a similar title. That sentiment pretty much reflected my state of mind at the time. Our stakeholders, as well-intentioned as they were and as valuable as their insight was, were not our users. The level of perspective they could provide regarding losing all of their possessions and being reliant on external resources for survival could not be sourced there; we needed to hear from those who had gone through it personally and lived to tell the tale. Once we had done so, we extracted key points and used them (1) to build empathy with product ownership and (2) to inform design decisions.

It was rough initially getting buy-in for user research. However, a pivotal moment surfaced after an all-day, in-person ideation session with most of client-side product ownership allowed them to see the benefits of deriving survivor-driven insights firsthand. They became excited to learn what other insights could be gathered through user interviews and user testing. This was the push we needed to get into the nitty gritty of research and design.

Generating Insights

This "wall of perspective" provided us with some valuable insights, such as:

• During trying experiences such as disasters, survivors are likely to miss key dates and deliverables which might help them in their pursuit of assistance.
• Survivors cannot depend on the availability/performance of the system and/or fear they might lose information before they have an opportunity to save their application.
• Survivors experience difficulty locating functionality, field groupings, or information which might help them better understand/complete the application.
• Users experience difficulty submitting or executing critical functionality.
• Users feel that there are frequent conflicts between information provided by customer service and the website.
• Users cannot confirm that information and/or documents entered into the system are accurate prior to submitting their applications.
• Additional instructions or methods of transmitting information to FEMA might prove to be beneficial to less tech-literate survivors.
• Survivors tire of having to enter and re-enter large amounts of previously-submitted information into applications with which to continue receiving assistance.
• Users find difficulty in printing elements of the website/application.

Challenge: Facilitating a More Intuitive Document Upload Process

I could not find the 2 documents a representative told me were online.

The previous document upload did not articulate document upload types, file size, upload status, or prompts. I redesigned the feature to emphasize these aspects.

Challenge: Designing a Survivor Dashboard

I think that it would be easier for applicants to see the status on their applications and how far along the process is. I have not received any phone calls or emails about the status of my application and it's been almost a month.