Designing a wildfire-relief hub in eight days
OVerview
An exploration of how to design with efficiency, speed, and urgency. Creating meaningful and impactful designs with limited time and support.
My role
As Senior UX Designer, I owned the page structure and wireframes, translating extensive stakeholder requirements into a focused, accessible experience. I identified and adapted approved design-system components to accelerate delivery, while aligning design, content, and business partners around key decisions throughout the eight-day design process.
01/ Background and Ask
The Palisades Fire was one of the most destructive wildfires in Los Angeles history. Bank of America has a strong presence in a lot of local markets there and were really invested in this project because it hit close to home for them.
We were tasked with publishing a landing page on the Bank of America About ecosystem that focused on connecting people with critical resources in response to the wildfires. We needed to tell the story of Bank of America’s commitment to help rebuild LA, and get it done FAST.
03 / The Challenge
Typically creating a new landing page with Bank of America takes at least eight weeks. Due to the urgent nature of the disaster and the project, we had just eight days from kickoff to executive approval,
and just three weeks total from kickoff to published. The timeframe was extremely compressed, with a small team and no developmental support. We worked to compile, design and include:
Proof points conveying Bank of America's commitments
Partnerships info
Tips, tools, and help
Resources tailored to consumer, small and large business owners, and wealth clientele
Consistent work sessions that kept momentum going and led to high quality output, while prioritized crisis-critical user actions
Strong Figma and teams organization from all capabilities, while reusing approved components to reduce design and compliance risk
Clear feedback and collaboration from Bank of America, all while running content and design as parallel workstreams
Used specific partnerships and proof points to communicate Bank of America’s community impact with credibility
Bank of America gave us extensive documentation on audiences, messaging, and priorities - and we then had to quickly identify what actually matters to people in crisis. In the end, we were able to meet our deadlines: executive approval in eight days, live and published in three weeks.
View the live page here!
Final product Overview
One thing to note is that we're using what we learned from this
project as a reference point for future quick turnaround
projects. We shared our experience with the larger Boston experience design team, and even in a Digitas all staff!
All in all, the compressed timeline reinforced that speed comes from clear priorities, reusable systems, and tightly defined decision paths. The best work can happen when there's no time to overthink it. Thanks!