Rescue: A Resources Management and Mobilisation
A mobile application created to help the government with resource management and mobilisation during calamities. Born from the Kerala flood of 2018, it serves as a distributed tool for data aggregation and collection to coordinate inventory, resource availability, and allocation.
Role
Sole Designer
Industry
Government,Social Impact
MessagePlus bet on WhatsApp as the primary support channel, not email or chat widgets. I joined as the sole designer to take the product from zero to live in two months.
Challenge
The users were government officials and field coordinators, not a typical tech-savvy audience. Getting access to them for research meant navigating bureaucratic structures, building trust, and conducting sessions in conditions that were far from a controlled usability lab. The product also needed to work in low-connectivity environments, be learnable in minutes, and handle coordination across multiple levels of government hierarchy, district, taluk, and village.
What I built
Designed a mobile application centered on three core workflows: inventory tracking, resource allocation, and field team coordination. The interface was deliberately simple, large touch targets, minimal text, and a data model that could work offline and sync when connectivity resumed. Conducted user research directly with government officials to validate every assumption, despite the access challenges.
Mobile-first UX for government field officers with minimal tech familiarity
Distributed data collection that works offline and syncs on reconnection
Inventory and resource tracking across district, taluk, and village levels
Allocation workflows that minimize manual coordination overhead
Research conducted directly with government officials and field responders
Outcome
The product was built and validated with real users. When COVID-19 began in early 2020, the team was mid-launch, the outbreak halted the rollout before the product could go live. The work remains a grounding project: designing for real constraints, real stakes, and users whose feedback could only be gathered in bureaucratic corridors.
Outcome
The product was built and validated with real users. When COVID-19 began in early 2020, the team was mid-launch, the outbreak halted the rollout before the product could go live. The work remains a grounding project: designing for real constraints, real stakes, and users whose feedback could only be gathered in bureaucratic corridors.
