In this paper the authors developed applications for apps in times of crises and critical situations. They analyzed how people act in these situations and how to mitigate their uncertainty and fears through situation-specific communication. Including these aspects as well as the general challenges of crisis communication, pros and cons of apps based on existing examples were discussed. The resulting requirements for an app for crises and dangerous situations should assist in designing a communication solution that strengthens the feeling of security of citizens in critical times, such as life-threatening situations. This solution is intended as an additional means of communication for emergency services to modernize crisis communication with affected people.
Usability testing is expensive in some domains due to the resource requirements that go hand in hand with taking a complex context of use into account. Crisis-related research is one such domain, typically requiring the reenactment of an extensive crisis scenario. To lessen the resource requirements and provide a more flexible setup geared towards testing, crisis scenarios can be reconstructed as virtual reality simulations. This paper outlines the development of an initial prototype of such a simulation following the design science method. The prototype is used to test if injecting an item that will be tested into the simulation affects the realism of the virtual reality crisis simulation. The realism was measured in a within-subject experiment and equivalence tests showed that injecting a representation of a simple app had no significant influence on the realism of the simulation.
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