Kalki
Disaster relief app concept.
Backstory: It was December 2015, This excessive rainfall in Tamilnadu was a disaster. Help was coming from all over the country. Lots of volunteers from Bangalore were doing there best to help the neighbors.
Many tech companies were trying to help the people in need of the hour by offering their service in one or the other way.
Me and my friend Giri Prasad, saw a problem which could be solved by design. A Scalable self-sustaining ecosystem which would connect people in the time of need like natural calamity & more.
For the next one week, we decided to work on it, we started with understanding the problem in terms of eco-system and stakeholders involved in the existing scenarios.
People who are caught up with their everyday lives, wish to run to help the people in need. But life gets complicated. Deep down all of us feel the urge to be helpful to another human being. Most of the times it becomes one of the satisfying reason for our existence.
We’ve always helped each other, that’s how we’ve reached till now.
Wisher: someone who wishes to help from a remote place.
Doer: someone who takes up the responsibility to act.
People who need help can be survivors of a catastrophe, kids who need shelter, food and education and more…
Objective :
To create a platform to bring these two people together to help the people who are facing the disaster.
To create a scalable and self sustainable solution which would be efficient in taking actions at the time of the calamity.
Design Directions
We thought It’s impossible to raise funds at the time of a disaster. Further we asked ourselves, How can we make this self sustainable ?
“ What if we connect this to the e-commerce ?”
we asked ourselves and we worked on a system design for the solution.
System design helped us to figure the user task flow and we started working on the information architecture of the application.
Once we figured out the user flow and information of the application, It was time to wireframe!
Check out the clickable prototypes of Kalki Patron and Kalki Crew.
Learnings and Takeaway :
1. System Design :
When we think of the problem in context to the outside real world, it gets more complex than we started with. It was helpful to think of the solution in terms of user scenarios.
Asking questions like Who would use this ? Why would they use it ? When would they use it? How would it be possible to build and scale? Why hasn’t anyone done this before?” helped us to stay on ground while ideating.
2. User Engagement :
To make this application scalable and self — sustaining problems we faced was the value proposition for the user at different stages of the day, week, month, year. To design keeping these scenarios in mind helped us to come up with more realistic features of the application.
3. Problem Solving & Teamwork :
We saw a problem which could be solved using technology and igniting the humanity in everyone and collecting funds and making it easy to share and monitor. making it easy and transparent was the main goal. Overall, It was good to see a project which started with only emotional values grow into a more rational one. Teamwork on building the right product keeping our selves aside, discussing the ideas open-minded and creating something which we both were proud of.
If you are inspired by the idea and interested, wants to help us build it, please get in touch.
