EYE on the Storm
Disaster Relief
Brief
Project Description: This project was created as part of Protothon 2017 hosted at NYU Tech Lab in Brooklyn NY. It was a 15-hour event over the course of 2 days, where participants competed to prototype solutions that addressed disaster relief.
Problem: Community needs are not met effectively through blind donations leading to over donation, lack of transparency and poor distribution channels.
Solution: A system to streamline the disaster relief donation-supply chain utilizing a platform for registered organizations. These organizations input their community needs to get supplies through direct donations fulfilled by partnered distributors.
Role: Design Thinking, User Research, User Experience Design, Usability Testing
Group Members: Gael Gundin, Sam Jones, Florentino Pamintuan, Brian Bohon and Arushi Jaiswal
Research
Before the start of the Protothon we were briefed by a panel of topic experts that gave us incites into the challenges and pain points that disaster relief and aid efforts faced. They directed us to resources and answered questions from the participants.
Featured speakers included
- Eileen Lofrese
Marketing & Communication Director, Hurricane Sandy NJ Relief Fund (HSNJRF) - Ellen Glazerman
Director, EY Foundation - Reese May
National Director of Recovery, St. Bernard Project
Brainstorming
We started our brainstorming session by listing all the possibilities and ideas that we could think of. At first we have a few very interesting concepts and the hardest part was narrowing them down. We used dot (strip) voting to select the 3 that we liked the most and then narrowed it down again into our top choice through a consensus decision process.
We decided to focus on the allocation of funds from individuals directly to community organizations on the ground. We wanted to create a web application that would allow organizations to request the supplies they were in need form. We felt that often times despite individuals wanting to help, donating clothes which what most people often do is more of a burden than actual aid. Community organizations are on the ground know best of what their community needs we give them the power to request the supplies they need the most right away.
Storyboards
Ideation
Rough sketches of initial concepts where quickly sketched out and then transported into the Marvel app to animate and test with users. We received immediate feedback and iterated on our designs as much as we could until we arrived at a paper prototype to illustrate our main concept.
User Testing
Testing on paper prototype
Observations
Some of our biggest challenges with this concepts implementation in real life are the logistics. Our ability to understand the real costs of logistics of how we would get these items to effected areas is something that we would require extensive research to more deeply understand the scope of the work and find a solution that was cost effective.
Another big obstacle that we face is assuming that the community organization actually has the capacity to receive this aid on the ground and handle the logistics to deliver them to the people. They might not have the resources or people power at the time of disaster to handle the donations as they have coming in.
Next Steps
Further wire-frames of the rest of the on-boarding screens and final checkout process. Creating the User Interface Design and further testing our concept with more users for added validation.