Emergency Management Alarm Activation and Alarm Access
Case study on the user flow for activating an alarm and finding an alarm that has been activated within the mobile app.
Project- Enhancement
Navigate360’s Emergency Management mobile app helps users respond to emergencies.
While redesigning alarm activation to reduce friction, we unintentionally made drills harder to access.
This case study explains how we resolved both issues.
Details
Role: UX/UI designer, UX researcher, User workshop facilitator
Tools: Figma
Team: Product manager, Business Analyst, Director of UX, one UX/UI Designer
Timeline: 8 months (July 2024 - March 2025)
The Problem
Based on user feedback, we separated emergency activation from active drill alarms.
Since the app is used infrequently, housing emergency and drill actions in different areas caused confusion and forced users to relearn the flow each time.
For More Context:
Alarm Modes: Emergencies and Drills
- The app’s most important function is to activate an emergency, and the most important use case for the app.
- Secondly, the app’s function is to practice drills and trainings. Drills are state-mandated, and the main use case for using the app, since drills occur more often than emergencies.
Activation is in Two Different Places
You activate an emergency from the home screen.
You activate a drill from the Rapid Alarm section.
Activating an Emergency:
Current State (after redesign)
You open the app and clear as day, you know how to activate an emergency- “You push the big red button.”
Activating a Drill
Flow to activate a drill within the app.
Accessing Active Emergencies and Drills- Two Different Places
Emergency:
Tap on notification, taken to the app home screen
Drill:
Tap on notification and are taken to Rapid Alarm
Finding a Drill After Leaving the App
People would forget how to access active drills.
So, in a panic, staff would activate an emergency by sliding the Emergency Alarm activator, which would cause unnecessary concern for the entire school.
How about we...
Find a way to keep it easy for staff to activate an emergency and a drill, but also make it easy for them to access current emergencies and drills?
Who are we desiging for?
Administrators:
District Admins/Principals/Assistant Principals
-Ensure annual drill requirements are met
-Can set off all alarm types: emergencies, drills, and trainings
-Oversee emergencies, drills, and trainings
Staff:
Teachers, Administrative Assistants, Nurses, Safety Resource Officers
-Can activate alarms
-Participate in drills and trainings
Success Metrics
01 Useful: The app maintains its purpose to be the tool used by admins and staff to activate alarms and practice state-mandated drills and training.
02 Desirable: The design is enhanced so users aren’t nervous when having to use an app they use a handful of times a year.
03 Usable: Staff can access what they need in the app and not activate unnecessary emergency alarms.
Process
During this process, we brainstormed design updates, conducted surveys, iterated based on feedback, tested again, iterated, and handed-off to devs for the enhancement.
Hypothesis
If the slider causes staff to react and unnecessarily “push the big red button” why don’t we remove it?
We first considered:
-adding the active drills on the home screen
-removing the slider concept
-still allowing the user to activate an emergency alarm.
Keep the Slider
Leadership didn’t like the idea of removing the slider for activating an alarm since this was a big selling point in all of our marketing materials.
How can we keep the slider, and add current active alarms to the home screen without overcrowding the UI elements?
A/B Test
We did an A/B test to see which design users thought was more intuitive.
A
B
Majority Favored Concept B
Design Decision
Mix of both concepts
We decided to keep concept A’s design for No Active Alarms and use Concept B’s Active Alarm component. My team felt the empty state for Concept B’s No Active Alarms took up too much real estate on the screen.
We also updated the No Active Alarms banner to gray since when there are no active alarms at that time, attention does not need to be drawn to that part of the screen.
Final Design Direction
Made it easier for people to find active drills.
Made it easier for people to remember how to activate all alarm modes.
Updated header text above the alarm slider
to be inclusive of all alarm modes.
All alarm modes live within a bottom sheet and not in separate locations within the app- serves as a stopgap for the alarm activator.
Color Differentiation
Since we put the alarm modes in the same location, we wanted to draw attention to the activators what alarm mode they were activating with color.
Red for Emergencies. Blue for Drills and Trainings.
Overall Takeaways
Importance of listening to users and CONTINUING to listen to users:
We did our initial user research. Research told us users need to not have too many steps in activating an emergency. So we designed it that way.
Since we followed up after release of the redesign, we realized muscle memory is a key factor for the product usability, which hadn’t been brought forth by users during the redesign discovery process.
Since releasing this enhancement, there have been less incidents of staff activating an emergency.