FEMA Wildlife Response and Rescue

Process

Discovery

To understand the challenges that our users faced, we started by taking a look at the data on hurricane Harvey and its impact on wildlife through government websites, news agencies, and organizations. We also conducted a dozen interviews with residents, volunteers, first responders, vets, and wildlife shelter staff.

Affinity diagramming helped us to distill our observations into 10 distinct clusters.

Key Findings

Effects of hurricanes on wildlife: implications and strategies for management

1. Hurricanes affect all life forms in the impact zone, some more than others
2. Habitat loss and flooding lead to critters turning to local homes and structures for shelter
3. Deceased wildlife causes widespread contamination and potential infection
4. Animal rescue/removal often requires professional skills to ensure safety

The overwhelming number of calls

1. The volume of calls is just too high to handle well
2. Resources are limited
3. Prioritizing wildlife reports and assigning them to proper organizations or rescue teams can be frustrating

Organizations play different roles (TX Wildlife and Rescue, Houston SPCA, etc.)

1. Organizations access to different areas was limited due to the disaster
2. Organizations often handle different animals and their rescue or extraction methods vary
3. They struggle with communicating with each other

Leveraging Volunteers

1. Small communities such as churches, schools, and neighbors created volunteer teams
2. The outpouring of support, but there is no clear way on how to utilize them
3. There is no unified system to share knowledge or educate them

Define

We identified three personas and their frustrations; the affected resident, the emergency dispatching team, and volunteers.

Through user interviews, we understood that the main challenge for residents dealing with wildlife was the lack of a unified system to report their situation and receive the attention they needed. We examined many comparable systems such as 911, insurance claim systems, wildlife observation community apps, and disaster response networks. This helped us identify the properties of a reporting and record management system.

User Persona

After collecting our user data during our user interviews and online stories, we synthesize that data to create our personas which bring the common needs and frustrations of users to the forefront.

Jim represents the Affected Resident who has encountered unwanted wildlife in his home due to a natural disaster. He is an average person and may not have any idea what to do with this wildlife.

Design

We started with individually drafting some hand-drawn sketches. We discussed the features we each envisioned and we generated a user-flow. Our goal was to make the flow as intuitive as possible while collecting actionable data for dispatchers and responding teams.

For the design, we took a mobile-first approach. Our initial wireframes reflected the user-flow we surfaced earlier and then we tested our wireframes with users.

Our usability testing uncovered some pain points that we needed to address, and also some UI elements that needed further tweaking and improvement. Overall, users were able to complete all tasks. They reported that the flow was clear and intuitive to them and that they can’t think of anything that would be missing.

Usability testing insights

1. Suggesting commonly reported species can ease the process
2. Taking a picture or video of wildlife can be either impossible or dangerous
3. Visual confirmation of the wildlife can be useful in some cases and some cases it's just an unnecessary step
4. Depending on the dangerousness level of wildlife some alerts should be displayed
5. Some find the process lengthy
6. There was some confusion with some UI elements and navigation

Delivery

We used Figma to mock up a high-fidelity clickable prototype.

Prototype demo

Scenario: Imagine you are returning to your home, but there is an alligator in the backyard pool.

Task: Report the displaced wildlife to FEMA