County Feeding App
March-June 2020
UI/UX Design, Creative Direction
Company: krumware
Client: SC Emergency Management Division
South Carolina needed a way to track number of meals fed to citizens across the state at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to identify areas or demographics that were underserved in feeding capacities. We identified the core needs, developed a rapid solution to generate feedback, and within a month logged millions of meals. This vital data helped inform stakeholders at the state level to make educated decisions to support specific areas and demographics that were underserved and needed desperately at this time.
Problem
Building the Avtec Cadet Framework on a web-instance (from an on-prem system) afforded much greater technical ability to build and update. Leveraging Web Components and Polymer, our engineering team needed a basic framework and structure with how to build numerous R&D POC's in the Cadet Ecosystem.
Challenges
Rob B, head of ESF-6 at SCEMD, was working around the clock to keep counties supplied and unable to give us much lengthy feedback. He did sit down with his team to draft an initial idea of what we needed to capture from their perspective. This provided a great starting point from a validated stakeholder.
I knew that we didn’t have the time for full user research involving stakeholder interviews with ESF-6 staff, school district/agency employees, or staff on feeding lines that I might go through in this process. Not to mention, the krumware team had moved to working fully remote as a result of the pandemic and didn’t want technical or logistic issues to get in the way of this changing landscape.
We had to prioritize designing and building a functional MVP based on what information we could gather. I identified and leveraged what we did have access to: Phil A, our Product Owner, and Rob B, head of ESF-6 at SCEMD. Rob B was working around the clock to keep counties supplied and therefore unable to give us much lengthy feedback.
Was I positive on this direction? Absolutely not, in fact we still had a number of questions that needed answers based on Rob’s initial drawing above; however, with their rapid response, we had to do the best to fill gaps and develop a working solution in this time frame. In this instance, we weren’t sure of the exact decisions that needed to be made for our end users; however, what we were doing would reduce the strain and problems that ESF-6 faced currently. We anticipated working on further sprints to enhance this product based on feedback we hoped to gain. We had previously formed a strong working relationship with stakeholders in SCEMD’s ESF-6 while building their Mass Feeding Application and knew they had a strong understanding of our iterative, lean process. This was critical in moving swiftly.
Explorations
Needed
Success/Outcome
We initially defined that “success” would be ~100k meals tracked & 12 of 46 counties participation within 60 days—we surpassed this goal within the first week.
First week after initial release, 650 thousand meals were logged across 19 counties and 4 agencies.
One month after initial release, 7.8 million meals were tracked
Three months after initial release, over 35 million meals were served and tracked within our system across the State of South Carolina.
Within weeks of first release, SC Governor Henry McMaster was briefing meal feeding capacities of the state via our application in state and national-level meetings throughout 2020.
Went from concept to design to MVP release within 8 days (leveraging a pre-existing design system and ecosystem the application fell in, all designed while at krumware).
