The User Experience of a Natural Disaster

Amy Silvers EuroIA 2013

#DisasterUX

About Me

• Director of UX at CoreSpring

• IA by inclination, UX designer by habit

• Librarian without portfolio

• NYC native living in (sigh) New Jersey

• Follow me at @A_Silvers

Tropical Storm Sandy

Tropical Storm Sandy (which started life as a hurricane but weakened when it got to the US) was an unusually large storm. It wasn’t the most powerful or deadly tropical storm in US history, but it was one of the largest, and the second-most costly. At its peak, it spanned about 1500 km. It was the convergence of two very large air masses into a sort of perfect storm, and it also hit the most densely populated part of the US. So it was trouble.

New York City Metropolitan Area !

Population >20 million

That’s the New York metropolitan area. Depending on how you define its boundaries, it’s estimated at between 18 and 23 million people. That’s one reason Sandy’s impact was so dramatic.

Some Facts About Sandy • At its peak, the storm was over1500 km

in diameter

• 8 million people in the US lost power

• About 150 people died in the US

• Second-costliest storm in US history (after Hurricane Katrina)

Auto 4%Fire

4%Illness 5%

Carbon Monoxide 19%

Other 9%

Falls 10%

Falling Trees 17%

Drowning 33%

Source: EarthSky.org

Causes of Sandy-Related Death

Breezy Point, Queens, NY

Breezy Point is a waterfront neighborhood in Queens, New York, where many firefighters and police officers live, or lived. It was one of the real horror stories of Sandy. It was flooded quickly and thoroughly, and people were trapped in their homes. Then a fire broke out and quickly spread to other houses. The volunteer fire brigade was pinned down in place, and the city fire department was unable to reach the area because of the flooding. Over 100 homes were destroyed. Five people died.

Text

New York City, October 30, 2012

Parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan were completely dark in addition to being flooded. Traveling into the city a few days after the storm, when I was able to go back to work, was surreal. A mile from my office, people were laying in supplies of whatever food and water they could get, setting up informal charging stations for electronics, and trying to get through the days, while just to their north, life was completely unaffected.

Brooklyn, New York October 30, 2012

Jersey Shore, November 2012

http://www.flickr.com/photos/b0jangles/

Jersey Shore, November 2012

The Jersey Shore is a long stretch of eroding coastline that has battled many storms before. But it’s desirable waterfront, and it has continued to be developed despite its vulnerability to the weather. Sandy did more damage to it than any previous storm, but it’s being rebuilt once again. In the town of Seaside Beach, which just finished rebuilding its boardwalk, a fire destroyed a good chunk of the town just last week.

My experience: Nothing like that.

West Orange, New Jersey

This is my town. It’s inland, and it’s on a little mountain, so our experience of Sandy was different. What we have is trees. Lots of tall, beautiful old trees.

© NJ Tech Teacher

And this is what a tropical storm does to beautiful old trees.

What the trees do, in turn, is knock down powerlines, sending live wires into the street and killing the electric supply for entire towns. That happened all over the areas affected by Sandy, but New Jersey was especially hard hit. Most households and business in the northern two-thirds of the state were without power.

So...what does this have to do with UX?

Us

We were without power for 8 days. It was late October into early November, so it wasn’t terribly cold yet--around 8C in the house at the worst. Our house wasn’t damaged. We were able to get to work, albeit with difficulty. We had fuel for our cars, although it was hard to get anywhere because roads were blocked by fallen trees. We had food. We were shaken by the experience, and life didn’t feel normal--we were somewhere around the top of the second level of Maslow’s hierarchy. But in thinking about that, I realized that while our basic Maslow needs were being met, what we were missing was information.

Where to get help; what to

do next.

How to cope with new conditions

How to help; engagement

with community

How to prepare and prevent next time

Information is a need too. It’s less of a hierarchy itself than a thread that runs through every stage of a crisis. Unfortunately, for a lot of us near the bottom of the hierarchy, it was hard to come by.

PSE&G reporting tool.

PSE&G work schedule, published (in PDF format) only after the governor ordered it.

PSE&G added this to their outage information page after Sandy.

Information flows multiple ways.

It flows within the affected community

A natural disaster is an information architecture

problem.

Community-created outage map

GasBuddy.com Fuel Shortage Tracker

From volunteer efforts outside the affected communities...

Google Crisis Response map

From corporations...

From government

From service providers--increasingly through social media

From social media....wait, what? This guy, sitting on his couch in the unaffected neighborhood of the Upper East Side, thought it would be fun to make stuff up about what was happening. This underscores the need for authoritative, trustworthy information from the right channels.

Ecosystem of a Crisis

Primary victims First responders

Secondary victims

Emergency mgmt agencies

Federal StateLocal

NGOs/Aid organizations

Volunteers

Friends/ Family

Media Utilities & services

Insurance companies

Other govt. agencies

There’s an enormous ecosystem that develops in a crisis, and there’s information that flows throughout.

Time

Information needs change over time. Designing the UX of a disaster needs to account for that.

Context

- access

- environment

- medium

Authority

- credibility

- consistency

- trust

It turns out I’m not the first person to think about

this.

Turns out I’m not the first person to think of this. Ushahidi: platform and tools for democratizing information !Tweak the Tweet--well intentioned but not usable.

Crisis informatics--Chris Hagar of San Jose State University coined the term and is a pioneer in the field.

Data is not enough.

Ecosystem of Crisis Information

Primary victims First responders

Secondary victims

Emergency mgmt agencies

Federal StateLocal

NGOs/Aid organizations

Volunteers

Friends/ Family

Media Utilities & services

Insurance companies

Other govt. agencies

Information is not enough.

Intermediation: the right information to the right people at the right time.

Ethnography

Ethnography: understand who needs what, where and when

Bus lines in NYC, November 2013

How could better information architecture have helped avoid this?

Empathy http://www.flickr.com/photos/nycstreets/

Empathy. Workers listened to complaints patiently. They were affected too.

NJ Governor Chris Christie understands the power of empathy.

Empathy

What happens when empathy is missing.

Thanks.

amy@corespring.org @A_Silvers