Designing When Disaster Strikes
Web Design — User Research — Disaster response
The Palisades and Eaton wildfires are visible in this satellite image taken earlier in 2025. (NPR)
TLDR —
In January 2025, the devastating Eaton Fire in Southern California created a major communication emergency for Pasadena. Though the city had emergency procedures in place, it lacked a system to collect and organize information from all departments in one central location during a crisis. It quickly became apparent that the city would need to transform their website’s disaster recovery splash page into a digestible single source of truth for disaster response.
Through US Digital Response, a volunteer civic tech organization, our small team of volunteers performed rapid user research, comparative analysis, information architecture redesign, and process documentation to redesign Pasadena’s emergency site into a usable, livable resource, forming the foundation for an emergency communications infrastructure that will serve residents for years to come.
Before (left) and after (right) of the live website redesign, replacing walls of links with streamlined updates, focused on the most relevant information at any given moment.
My Role
Volunteer product designer responsible for rapid research and UX design of the disaster response communication information across Pasadena’s website
Team
1 product designer, 1 content designer, and 1 emergency communications expert @ US Digital Response. Our volunteer team worked closely with the City of Pasadena’s chief information officers and IT supervisors.
Timeline
4 weeks for rapid user research, iterative design, and content creation (January 2025). Our work on this initial effort with Pasadena has expanded to include disaster response projects with the California Department of Technology (which we presented at Formfest 2025 later that year).
For full information on this case study, check out the writeup at USDR.