Supporting Los Angeles' Homeless Community During Covid-19
Industry: Government / Social Services
Role: UXUI
Team of three designers. I was involved in early stage customer discovery phase and later rejoined the project to co-design the product.
The world went on lockdown when Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic. Stay-at-home measures were mandated in effort to prevent the spread of the virus. But what happens to the homeless community in Los Angeles who doesn't have the privilege of having a shelter over their heads or adequate access to healthcare? The question loomed over the heads of many housing authorities in the Los Angeles county and became more and more urgent as the virus began to spread.
I worked with a team of two other UX designers to create mobile data collection tool that would feed into a new desktop facing data visualization tool for service providers to use. The data would visualize virus hotspots throughout Los Angeles county in order for service providers to efficiently deploy resources in the most needed regions.
In order to build a real time database of how Covid-19 is spreading amongst the homeless community, street teams are dispatched daily throughout the city of Los Angeles, surveying the homeless community on symptoms, test results and general wellbeing. To date over 36,000 surveys have been conducted.
Empowering Outreach Teams with a Powerful Mobile Application
The mobile application allows for outreach workers on the field to survey homeless clients (previously done with pen and paper) which then allows case managers back in the office to leverage that data to take effective action. An outreach worker is able to view their client list at a high level and see each client's Covid-19 test result. Diving into each client profile, the outreach worker can view the last location of the client, create a search alert, and add more information via records or encounter surveys. Furthermore, outreach workers can message each other specific to each client. The map view allows workers to visualize their location in relation to encampments, shelters, and homeless individuals based on test results. A leaderboard feature was created post MVP launch to help incentivize outreach workers to increase the number of surveys they conducted.
Visualizing Virus Hotspots to Spur Action
Data that outreach workers would collect on the field would feed into a desktop application that visualized the severity of outbreaks within regions of Southern California. Based on the severity of outbreaks, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is able to quickly asses which regions to deploy resources and monitor more closely. A user can view high level regional data (test results) and drill down into a specific region to view actual outbreak data.