Interaction design for web emergency management information systems

The interaction design for web emergency management information systems (WEMIS) is an important aspect to keep in mind due to the criticality of the domain: decision making, updating available resources, defining a task list, trusting in proposed information. A common interaction design strategy for WEMIS seems to be needed but currently there are few references in literature. Our aim is to contribute to this lack with a set of interactive principles for WEMIS. From the emergency point of view, existing WEMIS have been analyzed to extract common features and to design interaction principles for emergency. Furthermore, we studied design principles extracted from the Turoff's model relating them to emergency phases and features. In particular, in this paper, we choose to follow the current trend in the definition of emergency life cycles. In our approach, referring to general policies in literature, the emergency management process is divided into two different sub cycles: back-end and front-end. From the interaction point of view, a formalization process based on the interactive PIE model has been defined. The result we propose here is a set of design principles for supporting interactive properties for WEMIS.