Many thanks to Katherine, Trishan, and Sam for coming to our exercise
Saturday. I hope it was as educational for you as it was for us.
I'm attaching some notes from one of my colleagues. She hadn't seen
Collabbit before Saturday, and I think you'll find that most of her
comments are items Sam has already noted or fall into the area of
human engineering that we discussed:
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Here are some of my thoughts on Collabbit in order of importance.
-Update notification highlighted in yellow must appear nested at top
of screen no matter where you are scrolling through the message board
(not just the very top of the page). Otherwise you have no idea
there’s an update unless you go back to the very top ever 5 minutes.
-Updates need better marking. Updates should either pop to the top of
the board or be more clearly marked. For example when you refresh you
have to hunt to find the updates. If there are more than one you
might miss critical info. Maybe have recent updates highlight
slightly or have a star/symbol to the left of the post? Also there is
limited space per page, after a certain number a posts things get
pushed off the screen and the user has to go to the bottom of the page
and click on page 2 to see oldest posts. If the update system isn’t
changed important information could be relegated to the second page,
for example if logistics uses a long tread while other department
chose to make a ton of single posts.
-Consideration might also want to be given to making Collabbit posts/
general organization more timely. In a real emergency that last more
than 6 or 7 hours the amount of posts are going to be overwhelming.
Maybe automatically after 2 hours posts should appear in slightly grey
text box or something along those lines to show that the info is most
likely outdated but the info is still visible to read.
-Site maintenance. Is Collabbit reliable? Who fixes it if it
breaks? How long will that take?
-Site security. Is this site secure? As volunteers come and go who
will monitor who still has access?
-Idea: status. Maybe we could steal a page from Facebook. Perhaps
nested on the side of the screen or at the bottom have buttons/icons
for the various departments. When you roll over the icon you could
read their most current status update or generalized short sit rep of
what that department is currently working on. For example if I wanted
to know what Mass Care was doing instead of spending 5-10 minutes
sifting through old posts and possibly missing something at the bottom
you could instantaneously see what they’re doing. That way people can
get an easy macro view of where the operations is in the grand scheme
of things.
-Tag function not useful as is. People either make too many tags or
none at all. Not sure how to improve this (maybe only a set number of
tags approved by EOC controller?) but currently not helpful.
-Technical issue, groups and tags overlap and become unreadable on the
right hand side if there a large number of groups listed.
-The email function/text message function was used very sporadically.
Staff needs better guidance about when and when not to send.
-Some people had trouble creating accounts, said never sent
confirmation or activated. Mine was instantaneous so this is second
hand info…
Overall I think Collabbit has a very bright future here. We just need
to keep pressuring staff to use it and use it often.
