Our team kicked off our responsive web project by brainstorming all possible sub-domains under emergency response.

• Police officers

• Firefighters

• Emergency Medical Technicians

• UNICEF

• Emergency room workers

• U.S. Military

• Natural disasters

After choosing university-based roommate emergencies, we identified our customer, service provider, and stakeholders, and locations at which we could access them for in-person guerrilla research.

• Customer - Students living on-campus with a roommate

• Service Provider - Resident Assistant

• Business Owner - CMU Housing Department

After deciding on our stakeholders, we headed to a freshman dormitory complex, to understand the relationship between each stakeholders and how they behaved in a emergent situation.

“My roommate has problems with drinking too much. I’m uncomfortable bringing it up to the RA, because I’m scared that my roommate may get into trouble.”

• Customer - Resident Assistants (RAs)

• Service Provider - Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs)

• Business Owner - Chief of Emergency Medical Service (EMS)

Guerilla/Secondary Research

We interviewed our newly defined stakeholders as well as performing a secondary research on CMU’s Emergency Medical Services (EMS), residence life, and amnesty policy — a major point of confusion that kept popping up during our guerrilla research.

Emergency Medical Services

• Completely student-run.

• EMTs volunteer for shifts to receive hands-on experience in medical treatment and care.

• About 12% of calls that the EMS receives are alcohol-related.

“CMU EMS’s main goal is purely the medical care and the safety of the patients.”

Resident Assistants

• Enhance quality of residential experience

• Work in tandem with University Police, house fellows, University Health Services, and more.

“The important thing is to get help as quickly as possible.”

Amnesty

• CMU’s amnesty policy protects individuals from receiving citations/university sanctions for underage drinking in the event of a medical emergency.

• Encourage friends to call EMS for their peers if a dire situation arises.

“I wish more people could be comfortable with calling us without having to fear the citation.”

Renewed Customer Journey Map

We remapped out the journeys for both EMTs and resident assistants in the context of helping an intoxicated student who needs medical care.

Personas

After creating journey maps, we designed three personas to represent our customer (resident assistants), service provider (EMTs), and business owner (head of EMS service).

Problem Space

With both journeys mapped out and our personas created, we were able to see the overlap between their unique pain points and opportunities.

Overlapping Pain Points:

• Locating each other

• Ensuring emergency care is applied asap

• Forgetting a pin number

• Lengthy/inefficient documentation

Overlapping Opportunities:

• Giving live updates on the patient’s condition

• Having pins of each others’ locations

Solution

We discovered that the common pain points focused on delayed time, so we proposed solutions that can shorten it.

Before

After

Problem

To contextualize our findings, we developed scenarios in the scope of our problem space with responsive web solutions for both the customer and service provider.

Solution

We decided to narrow our scope to two solutions:

• RA provides information about the patient before EMT arrives to save time

• EMT/RA both have each others’ location

Storyboard Drafts

We translated out scenarios into storyboards with responsive web solutions for both the customer and service provider.

Speed Dating

With five speed dating sessions, participants were extremely please with our storyboards. They also generated some feedbacks we found value and made a few tweaks to refine our storyboards.

Refined Storyboards

Based on our speed dating results, we refined our storyboards in an attempt to envision the complete user experience.

Site Mapping

We mapped out all of the potential screens necessary for our design, and visualized the overlap between our customer and service provider. We chose a selection of mobile and desktop screens that would best convey our idea.

Lo-Fi Prototype

We digitized our mock-ups in Sketch. Desktop screens were designed with the resident assistant in mind, whereas mobile screens were intended for the EMT’s consumption.

RA

EMT

Med-Fi Prototype

For our med-fi, we focused on separating out informational hierarchy through colored banners. As a whole, our goal was to facilitate users’ completion of the reporting process on our site as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

RA

EMT

From our critiques, we decided to make changes for our final prototype:

• More Information Hierarchy

• Prepopulated Resident Information (location)

• Estimated Time of Arrival

• Progress bar

• Push Notification for EMT

• Advice for RA when waiting for EMT

 Final Prototype

Introducing ASAP, a step-by-step, guided responsive website that:

1. Reduces EMTs’ time spent trying to locate the patient

2. Gives EMTs context about the situation they are going to encounter

3. Reassures RAs that they are capable of handling the situation.

Establising trust

Establishing trust is reassuring our customer that help was on the way for the emergency situation. As we finalized the designs of our solution, although we kept in mind the site’s efficiency, more importantly, we constantly questioned how to make it more trustworthy. With a one-time login and data that is populated automatically as customers use ASAP, users slowly develop the trust of knowing that the system will already know who they are, where they are, who their residents are, and how to locate them.

Fostering Self-Efficacy

Self-efficacy is defined as an individual’s perception of or confidence in their ability to perform a recommended course of action in a particular situation.

Using human-centered design principles, we wanted to specifically design because humans do not always act according to what they know. Our users may know what they have to do in an emergency situation, but when the situation actually arises, their knowledge may not spur them into the correct set of actions. Our design provided small steps they can complete to increase their confidence; and with some encouragement, we hoped to increase a user’s self-efficacy in handling the emergency situation they are facing.