On the Usability of Smartphone Apps in Emergencies An HCI Analysis of GDACSmobile and SmartRescue Apps

摘要

It is very critical that the disaster management smartphone app users be able to interact efficiently and effectively with the app during an emergen-cy. An overview of the challenges face for designing mobile HCI in emergency management tools is presented in this paper. Then, two recently developed emergency management tools, titled GDACSmobile and SmartRescue, are studied from usability and HCI challenges point of view. These two tools use mobile app and smartphone sensors as the main functionality respectively. Both have a smartphone app and a web-based app with different UIs for their different user groups. Furthermore, the functionality of these apps in the format of a designed scenario, fire onboard a passenger ship, will be discussed.