Towards a general methodology to assess the ease of use of public safety applications and crisis communications services

Ever since Davis' Technology acceptance model for information technology has been introduced in the 1980ies, ease of use has been identified as a key determinant of people's willingness to use information systems. This factor is particularly relevant for information and communication technology (ICT) for disaster situations, where users are under severe stress, potentially in danger, and have to cope with adverse conditions such as partial or complete breakdowns of infrastructure, power blackouts, and network congestions. The impact of such adverse conditions show that ease of use of ICT for disaster management and crisis communication is not only determined by the characteristics of the user interface, but also substantially impacted by properties of the backend and the infrastructure, such as its resilience and availability. This paper proposes a generalized metric for a holistic assessment of public safety systems and services for disaster management as well as emergency and crisis communication. This metric can be used to compare different ICT alternatives and to extend existing qualitative and quantitative approaches such as thinking aloud, focus groups, surveys and field tests by specifically addressing the unique aspects of a disasters which are difficult to simulate in trials and difficult to assess in interviews and surveys, in particular if a newly developed system or technology has never been used in a real disaster setting so far.