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ONLINE COMMUNITY WEB TOOL
Impact 360 Alliance
This project was my Capstone for my degree. My group was asked to research Impact 360 Alliance's users to find out their needs and values. While Impact 360's main goal was to find a future business direction, we also created an online web tool for usability testing of our findings. Through the full process we conducted two user research studies, created our prototype, and conducted testing for the validity of our findings.
Online Community Web Tool: Projects
Impact360 connects researchers, practitioners, needs, and resources to create problem focused professional communities that can design scalable solutions. They support creative problem solving that emphasizes user input and facilitates taking action for emergency management and hazard mitigation. When my team was asked to assist them, we were tasked with helping them evaluate more directions that they could take their business. This is because as an organization still in its infancy, Impact360 needed help ensuring that they were focusing on the needs and values of their stakeholders. To accomplish this, our steam started with researching their users and the problems they faced. To keep our scope from expanding beyond something manageable, we kept our research in the vein of creating a community of different stakeholders interacting. With that direction in mind, we moved on to inform the design of a web platform built to bring together stakeholders, as well as remove obstacles to common tasks. This design was then tested with users to ensure that the product was well received and to find any paths for future improvements.
Online Community Web Tool: Text
Online Community Web Tool: Image
Going into this project, I did not know much about hazard mitigation or emergency management. The main thing that drew me to the project was that it sounded like it could help people help others. As we began moving more deeply into the project, I was excited to learn that I was right. Being able to design something new is always interesting and rewarding, but designing something helpful is what I always strive for. Being able to contribute to something like this only made me want to work harder at spreading human centered principles to devices and communities. Also, while moving through this project we were able to dive into a new field and interact with the people who work in it. A whole new area full of unique ideas was shown to me, and that makes my understanding of the world just a bit broader. I may never need that information, but having it will still allow to me find new paths through problems I wouldn’t think of otherwise. Thanks to the passion of our participants I am prepared to take what they taught me forward.
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That being said, interacting with participants didn’t always go smoothly. Despite the time crunch, I still wish that we had planned more proactively about recruiting participants. The ones that we talked to were excellent, but were also maybe just as fourth of the people listed by Impact 360. By giving ourselves more time in the beginning, we could have expanded our potential pool of participants, allowing for more respondents to our studies and a more diverse perspective to our questions. I will be taking this experience forward to new projects so that recruiting is easier in the future.
Along with that, another thing to takeaway is that this project was large. There was so much to do in very little time, meaning that every action that we took had to be meaningful to the larger production of the project. It was a valuable experience that allowed me to feel the stress close to industry timelines, while also working as a group so that we did not get overwhelmed. While the stress wasn’t a positive, it will definitely help me remember all of the lessons I learned through this entire process. These tips are tricks are nothing major, but getting a better feel for tools and the process overall will lead to better efficiency in things to come
Online Community Web Tool: Text
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