CrisisGo

I joined the CrisisGo team as the lone UX professional.  They had successfully signed up several school districts with their digital safety and crisis response platform, and each expressed an extreme need for a messaging and reporting tool in accordance with state laws.  They were sold on the idea, but preferred to continue using paper accounting for their emergency and crisis management.  My task was to understand why our clients weren't using the tool.  I performed a quick heuristic analysis and found almost no means to recover from mistakes or return to important information.  We also didn't organize the information in accordance with frequently used tasks.  When a user was able to find the information they were looking for, they needed to back all the way out several steps to get to the next task.  This proved extremely problematic if the user was under the stress of an emergent situation, which slowed down their ability to remember the numerous steps required to finish a task.  The product was just too hard to use.

To understand what information a user needed to know and when they would like to access it, I interviewed our subject matter experts at the schools.  With user data in tow, I still could not convince the CTO that the problem was deeper than a graphic overhaul.  So I also conducted a field study where our team used the product to perform a scavenger hunt using the tools.  Even as the creators of the product, we failed miserably, driving home that simply making it pretty wasn't the answer.  Not to mention, we weren't under the stress a real emergent situation would present.

Centering the user's voice, we conducted numerous white board sessions with the CPO and customer service reps.  I iterated on our brainstorming and used the Axshare tool to get feedback on the wireframes we produced from our development team in China to maintain technical feasibility.  I created a prototype from our sessions and presented it to our users.  The response was so amazing I had to record the reaction from Levaughn Smart, Coordinator of Safety and Security at Kirkwood School District, a suburb of St. Louis and one of our largest clients.  Our clients could not wait to get the new design in their hands.