In a project mandated by President Joe Biden’s White House and affectionately dubbed ‘The White House Project,’ I served as a Senior UX Designer to develop a data visualization tool for FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program’s (NFIP). The tool’s core purpose was to visualize historic flood data and trends effectively.
My responsibilities began with creating a comprehensive wireframe and visual design in Adobe XD. This served as the foundation for the subsequent development stages. I then established a sandbox Drupal site, which acted as a prototype for a custom plugin developed to display map data.
Collaborating with two other agencies, I helped guide the development process, using the sandbox model as a reference. My role involved coordinating across three teams as an active scrum team member on an agile team. I was instrumental in developing user stories and acceptance criteria, ensuring that the project’s development aligned with our goals.
A significant challenge was connecting the custom map display to over 60,000 records of claim data, requiring meticulous indexing and calculation of figures for each selected region. This demanded not only technical expertise but also a deep understanding of how users would interact with and interpret the data.
The final product was a robust and user-friendly data visualization tool that provided clear insights into historical flood trends and claims. My contribution as a UX designer and active team collaborator was pivotal in bridging the gap between complex data and accessible information, fulfilling the project’s mandate effectively.