Emergency Web Alerts
Redesigned in 2022 for Sam Houston State University, the Emergency Web Alert is a website component designed to deliver timely and accurate emergency notifications to the university community.
Redesigned in 2022 for Sam Houston State University, the Emergency Web Alert is a website component designed to deliver timely and accurate emergency notifications to the university community.
The previous emergency web alerts at Sam Houston State University required developer support for updates and maintenance, which was time-consuming and demanded specific technical skills. This reliance led to delays and increased communication overhead. Additionally, people were losing trust in the alerts, often developing numbness or blindness to them, undermining the emergeny management program's effectiveness during actual emergencies.
This project aimed to increase efficiency, restore trust, and mitigate the risk of compliance infringement.
As the project manager, designer, and front-end developer, I worked with subject matter experts and communication professionals responsible for publishing emergency alerts. Then, transferred project to another web developer for implementation.
The target audience for this website component included enrolled students, faculty and staff members of Sam Houston State University, as well as local community members and visitors to the campus.
The old design showed one orange box on the program page even when the university was not experiencing or anticipating safety concerns. During an event, a red banner was manually added at the top of every page, regardless of how severe the situation was. This led users to ignore emergency notifications due to the frequency of precautionary messages and timely warnings. As a result, experienced users didn't take emergencies seriously, and new users overreacted to warnings. To fix this, I used the U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) to design different alert levels and worked with the project team to get everyone to define each level.
Normal
No emergency, precaution, or crime to report.
Timely Warning
A reportable Clery Act crime occurred on or near campus. The campus community should take preventative measures to protect themselves.
Warning
Dangerous conditions are possible or already occurring for the area campus but may impact the university’s regular operations. The campus community should take precautionary actions.
Emergency
Dangerous conditions are expected or already occurring, limiting the university’s ability to operate. The community and/or affected individuals should take immediate action.
To help users respond quickly and categorize critical events for reporting, I created Alert Type in additional to Alert Level which determines the icon displayed on the program page.
In the initial proposal to the project team, I selected icons for each alert type, often stacking icons for accuracy, sourced from Font Awesome. This resulted in 10 types. After hearing concerns about lengthy and confusing selection process from back-end users, I developed a matrix to reduce the selection to 6. This not only makes it faster to select options, but cleared up overlap between winter weather vs severe weather. However, the tradeoff resulted in loosing clarity and quick reporting on power outages and distinguishing weather types such as heat advisory over winter weather. During discussion, fire was moved to low user recognition speed as web alerts are typically used to report after, relying on text, phone, and ground support for immediate response.
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