Software for Emergency Planning and Response
A tool to help emergency planners and first responders plan for and respond to hazardous chemical emergencies
Overview
CAMEOfm, a desktop software tool built jointly by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the EPA, provided first responders with a tool to track and share emergency data for their community. This data included information on hazardous chemicals and their storage locations and transportation routes, emergency contacts, sensitive populations (such as schools, nursing homes, and places of worship), and transportation and evacuation routes. The tool (shown directly below) was built in the earlier 2000s and needed an upgrade to provide more robust functionality and a smoother user experience. As a two-person team, the developer and I set out to learn what improvements our users needed and unearth new ways to make their workloads smoother. In the process, the tool was renamed from CAMEOfm to CAMEO Data Manager.
The home screen of the original CAMEOfm, a desktop software tool that my team and I were tasked with redesigning.
A facility record screen on CAMEOfm, showing the location of a facility storing hazardous chemicals.
Research
My team knew we could modernize the UI, but we wanted to know what additional features and enhancements we could add that would solve pain points for our users in the emergency planning and response community. What could this new software do that would empower them to work more efficiently? As we began interviewing real and potential users of our existing software, it became clear that the two user groups—planners and responders—used the existing CAMEOfm program very differently, and thus, had very different needs. For example, one of the top requests from responders was to simplify the interface and limit the clicking they needed to do to access information. Emergency planners, on the other hand, weren’t under life-and-death time constraints, instead repeatedly asked for custom reports that would save them time analyzing data on what chemicals were stored in their communities.
Design
We received many feature requests (and ideated just as many new, creative solutions) for the new program. We weighed each request and potential feature by how many users requested it, how impactful we thought the change would be, and how possible it would be to execute given our small team and timeline. We ended up focusing on six major features:
For Responders:
One-click Responder Summary that consolidates the most crucial information for emergency response, including chemical names and identification, amounts, location, points of contact, weather, and site plans
Map to visualize the location of the facility and nearby points of interest, including schools and other high-priority locations
For Planners:
Feature to compare chemical reports by year, in order to see which chemical facilities filed chemical reports and which hadn’t
New export features that allowed planners to quickly create phone and email lists, or run analysis on chemicals stored in their facility
Editing records as a group (saving users from having to edit records one by one)
Creating multiple export files based on a data field (a feature that previously would have taken numerous searches and individual exports)
Because there was some crossover between our Tier2 Submit users and users of this program, we wanted them to have the same general appearance and navigation. We prototyped a few different navigation ideas—one with the modules displayed across the top menu and one with the modules collapsed into a “Go To” menu, and found that users preferred the modules displayed across the top.
A prototype of the navigation with the modules collapsed into a “Go To” menu
A prototype of the navigation with the modules displayed in the banner across the top of the program
Because the NOAA and the EPA (the two government agencies producing the software) use primarily blues and greens, we stuck with a cool color palette that was similar to the redesigned Tier2 Submit, but still visually distinct.
Testing
Testing didn’t have a set start or end date--we were constantly talking with users, learning more about their experiences, sending them prototypes, and validating our design ideas. Once we had a beta to test, made a few adjustments, including:
Adjusting the search UI to make it easier to add new search fields
Making the map bigger
Adding new export options
Standardizing icons across the program, so that users could anticipate their meaning, even in new contexts
Adjusting the lock feature to lock a record on a case-by-case basis, rather than being a global mechanism
Adjusting the behavior of the feature that compared reports across years to make it align with users’ mental model of which reports should be compared
Final Product
A hazardous chemical facility record, showing the facility, its location information, and other areas of interest on a map.
The responder summary for a hazardous chemical facility record.
The feature that compares hazardous chemical facility reports across years.
A hazardous chemical record, showing where the chemical is located at the facility and what components make up the chemical.
“In the past it would take us several hours to revise our reports. With the new CAMEO Data Manager, it only took one hour.”
Results and Learning
This project was a lesson in prioritization. There were so many features—from data visualization to custom fields to cross-program integration—that I wanted to see make it into the released version. But with a two-person team and less than a year to develop the new program, many of those ideas had to be tabled for future updates. I’m proud that with our limited resources, we were still able to not only make the interface more user-friendly, but also build in brand new features that our users reported will save them weeks worth of work.
Check out this blog post about the project or see the software below.