About Us
Merlin Software consistently seeks innovative ideas to integrate into its products, ensuring we continue to provide our users with the premier software platform for crisis management. Consequently, we were immediately enthusiastic upon learning through the MKB Digiwerkplaats that The Hague University of Applied Sciences was seeking a client for a design project. This final first-year project of the Bachelor's program in User Experience (UX) Design offered us the opportunity to formulate a design brief that a total of 16 students could individually tackle.
As the entire program is conducted in English, we arrived at the following assignment description: "For your design challenge we want to focus on the use of our mobile application during the warm phase of a crisis situation. These situations happen always unexpectedly and (ideally) infrequent. This means that the application needs to be very user-friendly and provide a user experience that is fitting for a crisis situation where emotions run high. We are interested in exploring how our current application could be improved for use during a crisis situation and would like to challenge you in creating interesting and inspiring design solutions."
Over a period of 3 months, the students navigated the entire design process, encompassing user analysis, insights, and ideation, culminating in the presentation of a prototype. We formulated the assignment openly, allowing students to explore various directions. It was particularly gratifying to observe that each student selected different components of the application and proposed improvements. Through this blog, we aim to provide insight into how the UX students envision transforming our application to enhance its user-friendliness further.
For us, this project proved to be a highly educational and rewarding experience. It provided us with new insights that we intend to develop further, ultimately elevating our application to a superior level. This will undoubtedly require additional time, as, with most projects, the design phase merely marks the commencement of the overall process. We can confidently state that these new insights will be invaluable to both us and our users.
Therefore, we extend our sincere gratitude to the students for their dedication! And we thank The Hague University of Applied Sciences for the opportunity to collaborate on this engaging and educational project. This experience has certainly left us eager for more!
