The International Rescue Committee responds to refugee crises around the globe, and needs to handle these extremely complex situations quickly and systematically. To enable this, I designed an interactive visual checklist of critical steps present in most responses, to be used by field staff in a variety of emergency environments.

Define

I began this project by setting a definition of the end user with the team. From there, we established the project goal of improving the quality of emergency responses by making troves of IRC best practices and procedures available in a clear, standardized guide available to those users.

Interview

To challenge some of the assumptions we'd made about the problem, I spent time interviewing a variety of field staff who could end up benefitting from an Emergency Roadmap to fully understand their needs. I also created a set of easy surveys for users to respond to with their feedback, which were used throughout the process

Test

To validate what we learned in interviews, I quickly created a basic working prototype of the tool that users could navigate based on the needs they had expressed so far. The prototype included a built-in feedback system so I could immediately start collecting thoughts from users.

Iterate

With a working model, I was able to do live user tests to learn how various users interacted with the product, depending on what they needed (whether they were searching for a specific template, or guidance on a certain phase of the response). From there, it was simple to make changes to the structure, layout, and content of the roadmap to experiment with what worked and what didn't.

The results

In a 7-week time frame, I delivered a validated, complete design and flow model for an intuitive roadmap that measurably reduced the number of steps for users to access the guidance and documentation they needed.

Want to learn more about the work the IRC is doing to help refugees around the world?

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