A Good Project for a Worthy Message
Since the infamous Y2K hype, have you given thoughtful consideration to emergency preparedness? You might have an old emergency supply kit sitting in the garage, but have you ever sat down and made an emergency plan? Would you even know where to begin? Most folks, probably don’t, so that’s why we created this: www.knowhat2do.com/plan

Our online planning tool helps families of North Texas create their own printable emergency plan from the KnoWhat2Do website. The emergency plan consists of important contact information, emergency meeting places, household information, and more. Our goal was to create a tool that was useful and extremely simple to use. This meant it needed to behave intuitively and quickly.

Research, Borrow & Improve
Before designing the user interface, we reviewed similar applications that already existed, borrowing what worked well while improving what didn’t. As a result, we simplified the interface to allow users to add any number of places, pets, or people via a simple wizard-like interface with the ability to jump to any part of the process. To avoid continual page refreshes after each user-initiated event (adding or removing locations and editing emergency content), we love AJAX.

Making it Easy, Thanks Google!
In addition, we incorporated Google Maps to allow users to easily lookup locations and add them to their plan with a single click of a button rather than having to type each address manually. Similarly, the Google API allowed us to provide phone number searches as well. So if a user wanted to add the phone number for something like Poison Control, they could just search for it and click “add to plan”. Simple and intuitive. Once the user is finished, a PDF is created that they can print, fold, and keep in their wallet or purse.

So far (as of April 15, 2010), 100 families have made plans in case of emergency. It’s nice to know that what we create could help someone should the unexpected happen. We plan to add new features and enhancements to the KnoWhat2Do emergency planner and as soon as we launch 2.0 we’ll tell you all about it in a new post.