Introduction

The dam rupture in Brumadinho generated a large judicial process to investigate the consequences of it through the lenses of many areas: social, environmental, biological and others. A project involving lots of professors and researchers of the Federal University of Minas Gerais took place to conduct and share the studies for the population.

🎯 The problem

Hundreds of judicial documents and scientific evidence were created a few months after the rupture. The judge's team and the population needed a place to consult those materials in an intuitive and searchable way.

💡 The solution

As a team of 8 people, we developed an intuitive web platform to allow everyone to search for documents related to the dam break and its consequences.

The process

After the team members were selected, several internal meetings were conducted to talk about the scope, predict limitations and weaknessess and plan the design and the execution phases. By the end of the conversations, a diagram was made to summarize the decisions.

General Data Flow diagram of the project, aligned with the team members and stakeholders.

Since the basic research and agreements were done, the team started the execution. While the engineering team was preparing the environment and the API connections, the design team worked in the variations for the platform's UI, as shown below.

Variations for different parts of the platform, such as the home screen, login and the combined search flow.

While working in the variations, 5 usability tests were conducted to check how the users would interact with the platform. It was incredible to listen to people with such different backgrounds and the testing phase led to over 30 improvement points in the system. The final version had only the essential to provide a good experience while browsing and reading the website's files.

In the final version of the interface, Brumadinho's map is the main component and makes it easy to navigate through geographical and environment research.

As a good practice of public systems like this one, Plataforma Brumadinho was also designed to work well with tablets and smartphones. Basic requirement, but we found out it was really helpful for the researchers, specially the ones working in the field.

A sample of the platform look and feel in the iPad.

After the system's rollout, in 2020, we received lots of feedbacks and a great reaction from the university and also from Brumadinho community. This project was very special to me due to the social and environment causes we helped to defend. It was my first big project besides outside of the college courses and definitely made a mark on how I see design and it's role on society.

The platform is available for free here.