Using video prototyping as a means to involve crisis communication personnel in the design process: Innovating crisis management by creating a social media awareness tool

Abstract

Social media is increasingly used for all kinds of everyday communication, with vast amounts of user-generated content being continuously generated and published. The data provides a new form of information source that can be exploited for obtaining additional knowledge regarding a subset of the population. Although it might be difficult to organize and assess individual text fragments, valuable insights contributing to the overall situational awareness can also be gained through acquiring social media texts and analyzing statistical properties in the data in near real-time. One such avenue of approach which is currently being developed is to analyze the text content linguistically and extract measures regarding the overall feelings and attitudes that people express in relation to an ongoing crisis. To make use of this kind of new information requires the algorithms and the resulting statistics to be designed and presented according to operational crisis management needs. In this paper, we describe the involvement of crisis management stakeholders in a series of user-centered activities in order to understand the needs, and design a useful tool. In particular, video prototyping has been used as method for quickly capturing a first explicit design idea based on real life experience, that could later be used for further generalization and tool design. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.