NearAid
Finding help close to home during an outage.
Product design
Interaction design
Context
Community resilience product concept.
Role
Product designer and researcher.
Year
2025
NearAid explores how neighbors could coordinate during electricity and water outages. The mobile concept brings local reporting, status updates and requests for help into one experience, with particular attention to older adults and multilingual users. Research and testing focused the design on readable information and clear actions during a stressful moment.
Finding useful local information
During an outage, people need to understand what is happening nearby and where they can find help. NearAid connects local reports with community assistance, giving someone a way to move from an update to a relevant action.
Designing across language and age
Research considered the experience of an older user whose first language is Spanish. That perspective made language access, readable text and recognizable actions central to the design. Dense instructions and small controls could make an already difficult situation harder to navigate.
Reporting and asking for help
The main flows connect outage reports, local updates and neighbor-to-neighbor assistance. People can check the situation around them, ask for support or offer help. Clear status information provides context for those actions and helps distinguish an ongoing problem from a resolved update.
Reducing the density
Testing highlighted overcrowded screens and information overload. I revised the interface with larger touch targets, more spacing and more legible text. A restrained palette distinguishes neutral information, urgent updates and resolved reports, with blue, red and green supporting the hierarchy.
Designing for the difficult moment
The testing made clear how easily a useful feature can become another demand on someone’s attention. Further development would need to address the reliability of reports, privacy when sharing location and behavior under limited connectivity. These questions belong at the center of a product intended to support people during disruption.
