In the summer of 2019-2020, Australia suffered its worst bushfire season on record, with approximately 25.5 million acres burned and an estimated 1 billion wild animal deaths. When the bushfires were at their peak, I began studying abroad at the University of New South Wales, taking their January summer course in Human Computer Interaction (COMP3511). For our final project, my team and I developed a prototype for a digital product focused around the theme of bushfire safety.
Sharon Lin, Sarah Snow, Jon Bishop, Owen Fulton
UI/UX Designer, UX Researcher
Illustrator, Adobe Xd, Google Suite
January 2020
1. Receive challenge statement
2. Create product concept to answer challenge statement
3. Develop personas and context scenarios
4. Conduct user surveys
5. Create medium-fidelity prototypes
6. Test medium-fidelity prototypes
7. Create high-fidelity prototypes based off feedback
Bushfire Buddy is a tablet application which allows families to plan safe travel during bushfire season. Using fire analytics, Bushfire Buddy is able to generate routing and accommodation options, air quality predictions, and travel activity suggestions.
To better empathize with the users we were targeting, we drafted personas and context scenarios of potential uses of our app.
My team and I interviewed 9 target users with ages ranging from 20 to 40. When it came to bushfire concerns, interviewees were primarily concerned with potential property damage, road and area closures, air quality reductions, and climate/weather changes. Some interviewees pinpointed fire locations through applications such as Rural Fire Safety and/or Australian Fires. They also monitored air quality on any given day using AirVisual. However, our interviewees indicated a desire for a product which could concurrently provide both services.
Most interviewees used Apple or Google Maps for route planning. Through our interviewees, we discovered that users had an affinity towards having real-time location updates, turn-by-turn navigation, integrated bus transit times, and the ability to look up street addresses.
While we did try to interview for accessibility concerns, none of our interviewees listed any major accessibility challenges with any devices — though some disclosed they had low vision or colorblindness.
As the team’s UI Designer, I created paper prototypes to address our survey findings. Using Adobe Illustrator, I designed 10 screens and 6 interactive elements to print out for user testing. We then conducted user tests with 8 participants aged 20 to 36.
Once our testing was completed, my team and I compiled an issues table of feedback — labeling the type of feedback (Usability Goals, Design Heuristics, Design Goals, or UX Goals), whether the feedback was positive or negative, and the level of severity.
During our testing phase, we discovered several issues with our design:
• Some users conjointly used buses and trains to arrive at a destination, meaning it was unrealistic to separate these transportation modes into two separate categories
• The navigation for the ‘Accommodations’ tab was confusing, as it was unclear which content was clickable
• There was no proper signifier for what the warning icons next to the routes meant
Developing a high-fidelity prototype was neither required nor expected for this project, but I still chose to design one as a personal challenge. So after our team completed the issues table, I began analyzing it for changes to implement into a high-fidelity prototype. All logo and vector illustrations were done by me.
In the high-fidelity prototype, my solutions to user issues included:
• Creating a singular ‘Public Transportation’ option
• Adding pages for hotel and restaurant bookings
• Inserting clickable descriptions for the warning labels on the route choice page
Since I was simultaneously doing a separate design challenge for Google while developing this prototype, I gave myself a deadline of 4 days to illustrate, brand, and design the UI for Bushfire Buddy.
This project taught me how much UX research factors into the UI design process, and I now feel that neither UX nor UI can exist with the other.
Additionally, creating two high-fidelity prototypes with accompanying presentations within the span of one week taught me time management and how to properly prioritize each benchmark goal to get both products completed at a high-quality level.
If I were to continue developing this application, I would focus on testing my high-fidelity prototype with a more diverse set of users — especially those in an older age bracket. Though this application was intended to aid families, most of our user interviews were conducted with college students. As such, while the graphics and minimalist aesthetic might appeal to university students and be intuitive for them, the same might not be the case for users of an older age group.