Arnham Markac · Product & Service Designer

The work · Feature 06 · Government · Civic service design · 2016 – 17

Now reading · Wildlife, in an emergency · 5 min

Feature 06 · DELWP · Code for Australia · 2016 – 17

Wildlife, in an emergency.

Enabling anyone in Victoria who finds an injured or dead animal to get the right help fast, and enabling the carers and shelters who respond to be found, from one statewide network instead of a scatter of phone numbers.

By
Arnham Markac
Client
DELWP · Wildlife team
Partner
Code for Australia
Role
Designer, three-person embedded team
Scope
Public incident map · First aid guidance · Carer registry
Year
2016 – 2017

By the numbers

In brief

If you only have a minute.

When someone in Victoria found an injured animal, there was no single number to ring, and the volunteer groups doing the rescuing had little trust left in the Department. Embedded with DELWP through Code for Australia, our three-person team shipped a public incident map with species-specific first aid, and a registry where carers and shelters keep their own listings current.

I.

No single number to ring.

The situation

The people who find injured animals are usually members of the public with no idea who to call. The people who can help are mostly volunteers, in regional groups or caring from home.

Reports went to 000, to whichever group someone knew, or nowhere. Each shelter had its own protocol, and registering as a new carer was slow enough to hold back the network.

II.

Listening before designing.

The discovery

We started with no domain knowledge, so we went to see: wildlife conventions, shelters, Parks Victoria, Zoos Victoria, and volunteers across the state.

The biggest finding was not about software. Independent groups had felt unheard by the Department for years, and early sessions often became forums for grievances. We let them run, and treated the distrust as a design constraint: anything we built had to give groups more control, not less.

Code for Australia team presenting to a room of wildlife carers and Department staff seated around a long table.
Fig. 01A working session with carers and the Department.

The tool had to help repair a relationship, not just route a phone call.

III.

One map, two sides.

The concept

We designed for two moments: someone standing next to an injured animal, and a carer deciding whether they can respond.

For the public, an interactive map asks where the animal is, what it is, and what happened, then shows nearby carers for that species alongside first aid. For carers and shelters, a profile tool lets them set their own hours, service area, and species.

The second product made the first one trustworthy. The Department could never keep 500 volunteer profiles accurate by hand. Giving groups ownership of their listings solved the data problem and the trust problem at once.

Three phone screens: a map of Victoria with carer and shelter pins, a species picker asking what the animal is, and first aid guidance.
Fig. 02The public side: find nearby help, say what the animal is, then get first aid for that species.

IV.

A hundred species, six outcomes.

The information

First aid covered more than 100 species, and the right advice changed with what had happened: a severe injury, an orphaned joey, a dead animal with live young.

The information architecture had to get a stressed person on a roadside to the one relevant instruction, fast. We also defined what carers had to provide on sign-up and kept the rest optional, so registration stopped being a barrier. Each round of testing changed the flow.

Eight greyscale wireframes: is the animal alive, a species category menu, the map, a shelter profile, and a species picker grid.
Fig. 03Early wireframes. The first question is whether the animal is alive, because every answer after that depends on it.

V.

When the platform says no.

The build

Midway through, the Department wouldn’t let us build on its mapping infrastructure, so we moved to the Google Maps API, a map the public already knew. We kept the build to plain HTML and JavaScript so it stayed easy to maintain after handover.

VI.

Launch is onboarding.

The release

A registry with no carers in it is an empty map. Over a month we ran six regional workshops, sitting with each group to build their profiles.

For many groups, it was the first time the Department had shown up with something built from what they had said. The tool then went live statewide.

Three phone screens: the main menu, a list of wildlife shelters and carers with species icons, and a shelter profile with opening hours and a call button.
Fig. 04Carers and shelters as the public sees them, kept current by the groups themselves.

We are already seeing a difference in the shelters’ uptake and response, as well as a much better relationship with DELWP.

— Manager, Biodiversity Regulation, DELWP

VII.

What this work established.

  1. An emergency service is two-sided: the person who finds the animal and the carer who responds both have to succeed.
  2. When distrust is the real problem, give people ownership of their own data.
  3. Content design is the product when someone is on a roadside with an injured animal.
  4. Launch is onboarding. A network only exists once people have joined it.

I was one of three people embedded in DELWP’s Wildlife team through Code for Australia.