When I began my tenure with Maximus/Attain working as a senior iOS developer for NIOSH (part of the CDC), my first task was to take over the maintenance and production of what is now the OSHA-NIOSH Heat Safety Tool.

This is an app that, based on a user’s location, keeps workers safe from the threat of heat related illness. It has since been featured on heat.gov and the Weather Channel.

Working with a gifted team of federal workers and contractors, we went to work envisioning how the app could be better.

The original OSHA app had been outsourced. It had great bones to begin with. In fact a lot of the functionality was there, but it was hidden. It also lacked visual indication of the information being communicated.

We immediately identified key areas which needed improvement:

1. A lot of functionality was hidden behind a small  ⓘ “information” button in the lower right of the screen. In short, what should have been a tabbed application, was a single screen application.
2. The app used color and labels as key indicators of the current threat level, without a visual indication of how close to the next threat level they might be.
3. The app gave the maximum predicted threat level, but no indication of how the threat level is predicted to change throughout the day.

There were many other improvements we made to the app over its life, but these were the key improvements.

Proposed Solutions

The first improvement I suggested was the easiest: make the app a tabbed application. This allowed us to not only make it convenient to surface life-saving first aid and symptoms information, but to add an hourly forecast, all of which is easily navigable via icons at the bottom of the screen.

The second improvement was a visual indicator of the current threat level pictured below: