Disaster Design Principles

library that provides guidance and resources for designing in the context of disasters.

The principles are exemplified and research-backed and act as a starting point or as a user-centered checklist for teams working on their own people facing systems.

This library is currently online and accessible to any team working on the topic.

Designers:
Brittany Williams, Amelia Koster, Catherine Legros

Role:
Visual design, UI Design

Problem

The research on people’s behaviours in disasters was scattered

and the best design practices were not shared efficiently to the municipalities and teams in charge. Disaster Design Principles is a central resource to solve this problem.

This need was highlighted when speaking to Katia Tynan at the City of Vancouver’s Resiliency Office. She shared several insights and common misconceptions with us. When we asked if there was a place where all that information was gathered, we found:

Impact

Homepage UI

Our research insights are organized under four pillars on the homepage.

The 16 principles are

illustrated with an organized, graphic, visual design tone

to create a effective learning environment for those tasked with designing for disasters.

The Principle Pages

We included design examples supported by our research insights for each of the 16 principles.

How did we get there?

With the goal of improving people’s decision making during a disaster

we designed multiple touch points that would positively influence people’s behaviours.

In particular, we focused on improving decision making around evacuation in situations where there is a window of time for evacuation (forest fires, floods).

We researched and designed

a tool that focused on offering contextual resources,

which would have several

entry points and touchpoints,

to make sure it reached the whole population.

Community Resilience

We heard emotional stories about people in communities coming together to help each other in times of disaster. One of our biggest learnings was about

the value of local knowledge, community networks, relationships and communication

during an emergency.

We looked at how we could intervene earlier on by building awareness and changing the culture of preparedness far before a disaster happens in order to

create more resilient communities.

Researching the journey further

Because

it’s hard to test on or access people in these situations,

it seemed difficult to know how things actually go down; what the journeys are, the decisions, the emotions, and challenges. We learned a lot from people who were sharing their stories retrospectively, but it didn’t reflect the step by step journey.

We found YouTube vlogs were a good way to get the whole journey;

we watched over 7 hours of evacuation and sheltering in place stories from dozens of diverse individuals and families.

We mapped these vloggers’ journeys and identified the steps, pain points, decisions, and emotions.

We found patterns:

Through the videos, we realized that by focusing on evacuation,

we were ignoring the broad range of people that didn’t need to evacuate,

but were in a hurricane corridor. These people would be asked to “shelter in place”, meaning staying home while the hurricane passes. To do so, they would need supplies and need to prepare their homes, they would have a curfew, and might eventually need to evacuate. They too would have to go through several steps and decisions to ensure safety.

We created a new tool that was more aware of these considerations.

Although people’s journeys weren’t straightforward, they would all go through similar stages. We answered this by organizing these stages into clear steps to make them appear more manageable. This layout would also help with stress and create a comprehensive dashboard. We organized some of the content through checklists that are customizable so people don’t have to rely on their own memory. Checklists also offer the opportunity to put forward our own recommendations. We answered the need for updates by offering clear, local sources for it.

Where is the real value?

We had made a series of tools, they were polished and user tested.

But was this useful for the real world?

Could every municipality put this much resources into a service? Have a population that would respond to our high-level tool? We realized that what the municipalities could really use here, was what’s behind this tool: The guiding principles, the research.

Making a principles library

We put together all of our research informed insights and created a design principles library using our own user-tested designs to illustrate them.

Abstract UI

To illustrate the principles, we initially used our own design, highlighting the important part of it. Through user testing, we found it asked the audience to understand the larger context of the tool.

We simplified these interfaces to make the most relevant features salient,

through blockframing.

How this meets our goals

Our initial goal was to use interaction design to improve people’s decision making in disaster situations. The website we created helps teams incorporate interaction design insights (through user-centered principles backed by research) into their systems, which in turns makes these teams influence positively the decision making of the populations they’re planning it for.

Takeaways

The impact of showing up weekly for 8 months
Working through doubt as a team
Leveraging each member’s skills

We got to witness the scale and quality of work that can be attained through months of continuous work. We learned to navigate a space that had no easy answer and to constantly question our own directions to ensure we’d create something actually useful. It created moments of doubts, which we embraced and pushed through by reaching out to professionals and ideating/researching further.

Working as a team added a level of complexity in the process, requiring strategy and alignment, which we smoothly handled. Our team was productive, well-rounded, and we had fun throughout. We leveraged each member’s skills to their fullest and produced a number of deliverables that are reflective of the team’s talents and work ethics.