Interviewees consisted of a mix of men and women who were homeowners, apartment renters, parents, and singles.
Questions covered topics such as how prepared they felt for severe weather, what they valued most in the event of an emergency, and knowing of weather events and natural disasters.
User researcher brought to light some common pain points among users. These pain points included things like not knowing where nearby shelters were located, what users should have prepared ahead of time, and worry of not knowing about incoming severe weather or natural disasters.
The research collected was used to make personas to help humanize the data from user interviews, in order to make more empathetic design decisions.
Based on User Research, User Journeys, User Flows, and paper ideations, were created to help frame the user experience and identify further problems that could be solved.
Focusing on User Journey and User flows helped guide the process of creating initial paper wireframes
Five users were asking to test the lo-fi prototype, unmoderated, with a series of tasks and questions to answer. Users ages ranged from 24-55, and consisted of a mix of genders and ethnicities.
Questions asked about the user's feelings towards the product, and if they reached any points of confusion, or could not progress.
Comments and answers from the users were recorded, and used to create an affinity map to help generate and focus insights from the testing.
The biggest problem was a lack of confirmation that the user had sufficiently prepared for a disaster, which was exhibited in all user tests. Several of the users stated that they were most interested in the bag packing feature which was not part of the initial user test, so that was added after the first round of testing. Other users wanted a bigger collection of alerts.
As Lo-fi prototypes were developed into Hi-Fi prototypes, the insights gained from User Testing were incorporated into the designs.
To address the pain points of uncertainty in preparedness, preparedness confirmations were added to the final designs in multiple points of the user flow.
We built out the bag-packing feature for testing.
We also reconsidered the way Alerts might appear on the home page as well as on the Alerts page as well. This one gave room to add some short information following a title or name of the event at hand, and added an additional entry point to the main alert page.
While the mobile app was our primary starting point, we wanted to make sure the product was accessible via web in case users didn't have time or want to bother with downloading the app in a crisis.
During this project, I learned that features you thought would be key to the project, might not be of any importance to the actual user, and that's okay. I learned more about keeping consistency in small, but necessary ways, and got better at coordinating usability studies with users.
