SafeHouse

Role: Project Manager, Frontend Developer & Designer

Project Timeline: Sep 2022-Dec2022

The Problem

Over the last few years, the heat in Canada has increased to intense temperatures over the summer months. Districts like the Thompson-Nicola Valley have very dry environments which are at the highest risk. Wildfires not only affect our forestry and environment but have caused disasters across many communities and homes. 21,000 properties were under an evacuation alert last year with 181 evacuation orders implemented.  When evacuation orders are in place, many need to find a place to stay and others in surrounding communities want to reach out and help. From growing up in Kamloops BC, most of my summers were spent trying to get away from the thick smoke and hazy atmosphere from surrounding communities fighting wildfires. From seeing the destruction wildfires cause for the environment and people, it lit the spark that started the idea for a solution

The Solution: SafeHouse

SafeHouse bridges this gap between host and evacuee. Evacuees will now be able to get the help they need from those who can provide it in a safe and efficient way during a situation where time is critical.

Those willing to offer accommodations can register their space such as a room, suite or even backyard as a “Safe House”. The application will provide a map in which icons will appear in locations where accommodations are available. Information such as amount of space, whereabouts, and contact will be provided to evacuees, creating an efficient process to get them to a secure place in disaster situations.

Research

As a team we conducted research on the current evacuation processes, potential competitors and conducted a survey where 10 evacuees responded about their experience as evacuees. With this data we created user personas to create two ideal users for our app. A host and evacuee.

Design

In the design stage we started with user journey maps to base our wireframes on and further developed into a low fidelity prototype. Once the user flow have to application become more clear we refined the prototype and started to experiment with branding and color.

Development

Using ReactJS, we started constructing the webapp using tools such as Storybook to create UI components. For the map features we utilized and a NASA API along with Firebase authentication for user to create their profiles.

Final Outcome

The final version of SafeHouse became an minimal viable product that was operational on your preferred browser on any device. As of right now, I have put this project on hold as the project's team had taken it as far as we could considering our skillset and to reach the scope of our grad project. I am still passionate about this idea and hope it can one day come in fruition to help communities. If you or someone you know is interested in further development of this project, let's connect!