Apocalypse Prep
Ecological catastrophe has became a near constant just in the U.S. with Hurricane Helene (Sept. 2024), and Hurricane Milton and chemical fires in Georgia (Oct. 2024).
Just last month, the Eaton and Palisades Fires demolished Altadena, Pacific Palisades, Topanga, and Malibu.
Our users are not prepared for ecological disaster.
C+C Analysis of Popular Ecological Resources
We analyzed four popular system monitoring apps (Plume Labs, IQAir, Apple Weather, and AirCare) and identified the features they exemplified:
global data coverage
data accuracy (notably health-related)
affordability
mobile-web compatibility
With the limits of our hackathon and 6-person team, we acknowledged that we wouldn't be able to create a project that could compete directly with these companies' apps, especially not Apple Weather — which had become a go-to for iPhone users just by being native to the device.
However, these apps all provided our users a similar range of data (such as UV index, air quality, and precipitation) so we considered this a baseline goal.

The Reckoning
When we finished synthesis and our prototype skeleton, we faced a major yet expected blocker:
With the sudden growth of our team to 6, we needed to realign and rescope.
Our designers and developers were essentially building towards two different prototypes.
A Bit of Sunshine Amidst the Clouds
We found collective joy in including alien activity amongst our familiar weather app panels, as well as developing disaster prep guides for users personalized to their location.
Our developers prioritized a consistent, seamless collaboration despite the tight timeline and using frameworks new to them (ex. Next.js). They conquered challenges such as:
Building in Typescript with a disparate team (complex type alignment!)
Arriving at a backend data structure that accommodated their separately developed components
Adapting to component hydration and state updates
Experimenting with 5-6 APIs until finding one (Weather API) that covered all the data we needed for alerts and forecast details
Converting different pollutant types and mapping their concentrations to AQI breakpoints for an accurate total calculation
Notably, they managed state with React so that our app pulled data personalized to a user's geolocation (whether entered by the user or given through location permissions), without making a costly number of API calls per second.
Attributions
Open Weather API
reCharts
claude/anthropic
microsoft/copilot
Despite our week-long sprint, we conducted 6 usability tests, ultimately winning us the hackathon with our commitment to a user-focused design.
Our Speed Test Metrics Indicating Our App's Intuitiveness:
1.3 average misclicks
13-30s completion of all 4 tasks (navigating all pages)
Our Most Salient Trends:
5/6 users like the convenience of a native app compared to a web app
(ex: data storage, location recognition, and personalization)
4/6 users enjoyed the personality of the short descriptions
3/6 users thought the dashboard cards were clickable
We won the hackathon but are committed to improving the design beyond what we could deliver in just one week. Our judges lauded us for providing more accessible descriptions and interpretations of weather details than our competitors, but we want to be more intentional with our accessibility, given we now have more time.
Knowing that disabled communities are hit the hardest by ecological disasters, we decided to expand our real-world community impact by collaborating with experts in climate resilience:
a university professor who recently completed a federal policy fellowship on disaster mental health and has closely collaborated with CA’s Office of Disability for their Emergency Management Office
Partnership for Inclusive Strategies, which provides financial, housing, food/water, transportation, and administrative aid (ex. FEMA registrations and appeals) to disabled and aging communities navigating ecological disasters and their devastating fallout
Together, we can leverage our growing technical expertise to amplify their efforts and protect our marginalized communities during disasters.