Spring, 2014.
The Canadian Consulate of San Francisco sought to improve it's continuity of operations...
They suffered from the time lag and other problems that typically arise from disorganization and confusion when in crisis response mode.
They needed: a faster, less confusing, more learnable way to respond to emergencies, carry out their individual roles and continue consul operations during a crisis.
I developed a speed-reference tool of emergency checklists and guidelines
I designed a solution:
Reduce response times and smooth the learning curve by roughly 50-80% for client staff and executives.
Goal:
Carefully streamlining roles and procedures via heuristic evaluation and research (which led to my reorganization of the Consulate org. structure)
Constructing new information architecture
Developing a gamified, analog, role player deck -based on research, experimental findings, client and user interviews, user testing, and prototyping.
**Protected Client: Design assets and further documentation are not available for this project due to client security and non-disclosure agreements.**
This, I accomplished by:
Below are sketches I did for the concept I would build:
Design Decisions
I decided to create an analog reference product that was physically tangible, and NON electronic for 2 reasons:
1.
Attention span and reading comprehension declines significantly in times of increased stress. But it is still relatively better when referencing tangible, printed material rather than looking on a digital screen.
(this also guided my visual design choices for display and packaging of information)
Fact: When users were asked to recall the information from a paragraph they had read on a digital screen, they had lower retention and reading comprehension than when reading a similar paragraph on a printed medium.