WARNING: EVACUATE
IMMEDIATELY
Contributors: Jenny Chu, Ben Sandvik, Hafsa Khan, Yazan Maini
Imagine being told you have 5 hours to evacuate your home. What would you take? How would you leave? Where would you go? There would probably be a million things going through your head as you tried to wrap your mind around the idea of what was happening. Well, luckily for you this isn’t the case. But, unluckily for many people living in Eastern Washington, it is.
The Challenge
Many cities in Eastern Washington are evacuated during wildfires every year. We decided to tackle the lack of information of wildfire in local communities and the unpreparedness of individuals during this event in Eastern Washington. Specifically, how can we better prepare individuals for the wildfire and effectively notify them about the accelerating danger?
Our Solution
After identifying our problem, we decided to design an app that could notify residents of wildfire emergencies and assist them in evacuations. During the Wildfire season in Eastern Washington, our app will help residents be prepared for the wildfire and find a safe evacuation route using our app in case they have to evacuate. Users can mark themselves safe and check how people near them are preparing for the wildfires using the “Community Forum” feature in our app. For voice navigation, our app can directly send the shortest evacuation route to Google Maps. This app can really give a user peace of mind and play an important role in ensuring their safety during wildfires.
Proposed Design: Paper Prototyping
For our paper prototype, we started out with sketching out our app interfaces for the home screen, messaging screen, and evacuation route screens. We included multiple sketches of how the home screen would look based on different wildfire scenarios. The two tasks that we focused on were 1) Communication to residents regarding evacuation routes and 2) A community communication channel to let them know you are safe. The way we decided to address the first issue was by having an evacuation route accessible through the app whenever there was a wildfire watch or warning. We decided to address the second issue by having a messaging system within the app and a way to find and join community groups near you that you could post and message on.
After completing this initial paper prototype, we decided to test it on people from various backgrounds and age groups to see how they interacted with the app and what they thought was confusing and/or could be improved.
The biggest area that participants thought would have usability issues was the messages/find a community page in our app. Multiple participants said that they thought the messaging platform could be misused in various ways. These included: unwanted people having the ability to privately message someone, one’s privacy from having to share their location at all times with their community, repetitive information given through forums since they weren’t filtered by anything. After hearing this feedback, we decided to make this platform solely a “community forum” so that a person can only post/message within community groups they are a part of. We also added filters to these so that a person can refine the posts they want to see. Additionally, we also added an option for a person to turn their location on or off so that they are able to choose when they want their location shared.
Other common feedback we received was that our interface was very text heavy and during an emergency, it would be hard for someone who is under stress to easily navigate around our app. In our next prototype, we gave shorter names for items, such as “Preparation Checklist”.
Proposed Design: Digital Mock-Up
This is the digital mock-up of our app:
https://www.figma.com/proto/uZVpT2B9dMJWGLnjPwV5FI/High-Fid?node-id=1%3A3
From the start screen, there are a few options for where to go. There is a splash screen with some of the most important at-a-glance information to know, and also some You can always view the wildfire map by selecting it from the nav bar at the bottom, or view the community section.
Task: Communication to residents regarding evacuation routes
During Wildfires, the home page will have a button to display the recommended evacuation route from your location, as well as a map of where the Wildfire currently is and where it looks to be progressing. The user can always view the shortest evacuation route out of their home by entering their home address on the home page. The app will notify the user if they need to evacuate immediately and when evacuating, the user can open their evacuation route in google maps for Voice Navigation.
Task: Communicate with your community and let them know you are safe
In case your area is in danger, you can go to the community tab and click the “mark self as safe” button to let everyone know that you are ok. You can also see other people in your community and whether they have marked themselves as safe yet or not. Also from this screen, you can access the forums, where you can discuss emergency preparedness and evacuation routes ahead of time. You can also check whether people have marked themselves as safe from the map screen.
In wildfire situations, clarity and accessibility of information are the most important factors in keeping communities safe. Currently, authorities are not ensuring that everyone knows where to find the information they need. Our app closes this gap by providing all the information you might need in one place. It also provides a place for your local community to discuss emergency preparedness to ensure that everyone can be safe in times of crisis. Communities can check in amongst themselves to make sure that everyone is safe and healthy. With our app, the ever-present edge of anxiety can be removed from the wildfire season that always brings it.
