Project Impact
I redesigned two critical tools for Juvare, a company that provides proprietary software for government agencies during emergencies. These tools are called CORES, which is a platform for sending emergency notifications; and Missions, which is a tool for managing volunteers. By improving these tools, I helped Juvare secure over $3.9 million in new and renewed contracts. The tools were used by 12 state emergency response departments, hospital systems, US Air Force, Emergency Response Australia, FEMA, and other state-level emergency response agencies. In addition, I established a process for managing design resources at Juvare. This involved coordinating the work of two designers across six products, working closely with project managers, engineers, marketing specialists, content developers, and clients.
Project Background:
The CORES product helps emergency responders handle volunteers, organize missions like COVID vaccination sites, inform people about emergencies nearby (e.g., wildfires, accidents, shootings, hurricanes), and send messages to employees in a health system. Both healthcare and local emergency management clients were unhappy with the difficulty of using CORES and started switching to easier and more up-to-date competitor products.
My role:
I worked as a UX Lead at Juvare, where I collaborated with stakeholders to identify the goals and issues of the products we were launching or re-designing. Together with product managers, I conducted research, created mockups, and tested designs. I also worked closely with engineers to ensure our designs were successfully implemented.
Research approach:
After examining the current system with stakeholders who interacted with customers, I found many areas for improvement in CORES. This product is used by agencies of different sizes from various states and counties, each with their own laws, for sending emergency alerts and managing volunteer events. To gather information, I believed interviewing users and observing how they navigate CORES on their screens would be the most effective method. Our sales team had strong connections with around 40 agencies of different sizes and roles, which meant we had a diverse group of participants.
Key findings
3 unique personas were discovered - Administrators, volunteers, and municipality managers/employees:
Many emergency managers didn't use CORES' mission feature because it was too complex. They turned to Signup Genius, an outside tool that solves this problem for them. However, Signup Genius is not integrated with CORES, leading to difficulties in reporting.
Customers use features differently, especially Organizations and the Research status. They use it to hold and sort volunteers while waiting for background check results. If they pass, they’re then moved to the ‘Individual’ bucket which confirms their status in the pool of eligible volunteers for missions.
Sign-up was very clunky for prospective volunteers
Previous emergency notification experience:
Users had a very basic emergency messaging system. The form (not pictured) didn’t support a natural progression of to whom the message needs to be delivered, message subject, content, what medium, & when it needs to be delivered. Organizing this flow into clear steps was a high priority.
Re-design
I began the redesign by working with the project manager to focus on the most frequently used feature, which is Emergency Notifications. The first step was to create a user flow to better understand how Emergency Managers prefer to create these notifications.
New dashboard and New create Emergency Notification:
The old system had a difficult-to-use dashboard and messy messaging. I redesigned it with a dashboard that works well on mobile devices. I also divided the messaging process into 5 simple steps:
enter details
write message
choose response options
select send day/time
review before sending.
The next thing I focused on was Missions. I began by considering how users would navigate, including new volunteers, current volunteers/responders, and emergency management personnel.
Previous Missions (events) calendar:
This tool was basically unusable by current customers. Most customers ended up using Signup Genius’ much simpler tool for managing volunteer and response events.
New Missions calendar with mission creation wizard, and map and list views
With this new design, users can now easily create and manage volunteer events on CORES, with features like a calendar, a step-by-step guide for creating missions, and reminders. I also added a map and list view for organizing events, making it more convenient for users. These features work alongside the Responder Management side of the product, which includes volunteer signups, triage, and background checks.
Missions user validation testing
Approach:
After talking to stakeholders, I realized that Missions was a big problem that the team wanted to fix. With our limited time and staff, it made sense to try out some ideas for Missions in an unmoderated environment. We had a group of about 40 people who use the system directly and could easily do the test on their own time. To measure the difficulty of the tasks, I added extra questions to the prototype in Maze. I could also give the PM and stakeholders a straightforward report of the test results.
Key findings:
In general, people liked the design and found it easy to use and provide feedback on. Out of 30 individuals, 19 completed the task, although there were a few issues with it not being a fully functional prototype.
The naming caused some confusion among municipalities because they used certain words differently, particularly organization and agency.
For events with many shifts, there were worries that the design might not be strong enough. In my future tests, I predict this won't be a problem, but it could be a bit annoying to go through all the different shifts.
Hand off and outcomes:
I made a style guide for our product based on Google Material to assist our engineers since most of the UX work decreased. However, the missions feature was given lower priority just before I left Juvare. The rest of the product has been developed and our support team has identified questions and concerns. Many of these are good for further testing and improvement.
I was one of two UX designers in our company, working on 6 products, so it was challenging to allocate time for each one. I stressed the importance of research, collaborated with project managers to conduct interviews in my absence, implemented a process for clear communication, and planned design milestones for all our products.
One of the most important moments of my career was when elements of the CORES program were used to assist in organizing a large COVID vaccination event for disadvantaged neighborhoods in the west and south side of Chicago. This resulted in improved efficiency in serving a vulnerable community and contributed to our collective efforts in overcoming the pandemic more swiftly.
