Hurricane Harvey Project (Livestock Rescue)
Overview
Team Members
Zach Stevenot | Angel Robles | Kathryn Drury | Somaiya Kibria
Goals
Class project team was tasked with designing an application and website that will support livestock owners in protecting their livestock during a hurricane. Our mock client FEMA would like to focus their efforts specifically on Houston, TX, and utilize Harvey as their case study to inform the application and website being built.
Role
UX Designer
Tools
Figma, Miro, Google, Slack
Challenges & Solution
Challenges
Livestock owners need a communication method to chat in real-time and get live shelter updates, so that they can take proactive actions and avoid economic loss
Solution
To use a real-time feed and messaging service, where rescue teams, shelters and livestock owners can communicate.
Create a proactive alerts system and provide them with a channel for evacuation support.
Research
Hurricane Harvey impact on livestock
Agricultural losses from Hurricane Harvey estimated at $200 million
$90 million dollars losses in cattle
Each cow loss costs around $1250-1450
What Did the rescue effort look like?
Supply Points
Shelters (Texas A&M Vets)
Neighbors Helping Neighbors
Interviews with livestock owners, shelter workers, and first responders.
Gained insights from 10 users on certain problems like:
Finding high ground during a hurricane.
Livestock be left to shelter in place and needing rescue.
Finding supply points.
Too much paperwork for the shelters for lost livestock.
Affinity mapping
We took quotes, made “how might we” statements from the 10 interviews and found that there were big communication problems between livestock owners, shelters, and rescue units. We also found that only certain livestock ranches that were not on high ground were impacted the most.
Personas
User Goal
Our Personas are made from our interviews we pulled quotes to create their goals, frustrations and personal quotes.
Ideation
Sketch Workshop
We did a workshop for sketching out our mobile first designs and then voted on the aspects we liked on each design.
We then made a preliminary wireframe in Miro, combining all the aspects of the sketches we wanted to keep
Livestock Identification profile
We wanted to have a place for all the identification paperwork that the user could share, and it would help the shelters and livestock owners recover their lost livestock. The portfolio would include contact info, brands, livestock Info, and legal paperwork.
Testing & Improvements
Testing Results
We tested six users on three different tasks, the most confusion was around task 2 requesting help to move cattle to shelters.
Improvements after Testing
After our testing we combined our profile page and files, as users noted that keeping them separated was confusing. We also changed the chat request for support for moving cattle. We made it friendlier and less like an AI chat.
