EMIS - EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM

A tool for enabling coordinated communication for emergency responders.

The Problem

Lack of timely coordinated communication for emergency responders when managing disaster related emergencies.

Discovery: Research & Analysis

Our discovery workshops and field visits focused on finding the key data, actions, responsibilities and stakeholders needed in each phase of emergency management. 

I coordinated and facilitated discovery workshops with 120+ stakeholders from 5+ different departments in 4 local government authorities (LGAs).

To better align with the organization’s goals and expectations and to inform the project management team on the findings we held internal workshops.

Methods: Stakeholder interviews, discovery workshops

Insights & Key Findings

“We exhaust a lot of resources in the event of emergency. Better data, equipment, and coordination is needed to support our greatest asset: people.”

Dar es salaam Regional Response Team Coordinator

Personas

From the workshops we determined that we will use role based personas for our project. Role based personas focus on the role and functions of the user within the organization. The personas were used to develop user stories during the development phase.

Interface Design

Design: Concepts & Sketching

During this phase we did a lot of designs on paper before moving to Adobe XD for prototyping 

Tools used: Paper sketching, Adobe XD

Some of our high fidelity prototype designs

Development

Development: Sprints & User Stories

Development: Feature Prioritization

The first problem that had to be solved was information sharing so the development team started working on a feature called stakeholder which consisted of a database of all personnel responsible for emergency/disaster management; their roles and contacts.

Features that followed included emergency alerts, digital emergency response plans, dashboards, warehouse management, assessment toolkits. All features included geospatial data for map visualization.

Tools used: Github, Projects, Google Docs

Validation & User Feedback 

To validate our designs we presented them to the end users. This helped us to understand the position of our product in the users’ workflow, the ease of use, and what was still missing in our designs.

We showcased the UI designs and the developed prototype, we then allowed users to compare the UI designs and developed prototype for further understanding of how the design and development process goes. 

Methods: In-person moderated testing

One of the presentations we did at the emergency operations center (EOC)

Usability Testing & Improvements

Prototyping continued even during development, in the iterations that followed we added more features and redesigned some of the interfaces to accommodate new features and feedback from stakeholders. 

Changes to the UI design included

Methods: In-person moderated & unmoderated testing

Design Improvements

One of the dashboards that we designed to provide high level information about an emergency situation.

New navigation covers the whole screen and once away from the home screen users can access it by clicking a menu icon on the application header.

Solution & Lessons Learnt

The goal of EMIS is to solve the communication and information gap that existed amongst emergency responders. It has been adopted by the Dar es salaam emergency operations center and is being used for both training, drills and emergency response activities. 

My greatest lesson during this project have been 

“Proper use of data and information obtained from Emergency Management and Information System (EMIS) has improved emergency response and inform the regional authority the priorities during emergency planning. ”


Dar es salaam Regional Response Team Coordinator (in 2022)

Visual Design: Icons & Illustrations

Methods: Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop

Project Details

Platform: Desktop & Mobile

Year: 2018 - 2022

My role: Workshop Facilitation, User Research, UI Design, Prototyping, User Flows, Visual design, Usability Testing