Facebook

Context#

When a disaster strikes, the first question is usually the simplest one: are the people I love safe? Safety Check was Facebook's answer to it.

The idea started in Japan. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Facebook's engineers there built the Disaster Message Board to help people reconnect after a disaster. That work was carried forward, later through an internal hackathon, and Facebook introduced Safety Check on October 15, 2014, on Android, iOS, feature phones and desktop.

The interaction was deliberately small. People in an affected area received a notification asking whether they were safe. One tap on "I'm Safe" sent a notification and a News Feed story to their friends, and friends could also mark them safe. "Marked safe" became the feature's signature phrase.

Its scale grew quickly. After the April 2015 earthquake in Nepal, Facebook activated Safety Check across Nepal and nearby parts of Bangladesh, India and Bhutan. Within days, millions of people had been marked safe and tens of millions of friends notified. In November 2015, Paris became the first activation for something other than a natural disaster. The decision drew criticism because Safety Check had not been turned on after the bombings in Beirut the day before, and Facebook said the activation would change its policy for future crises (The Verge). By June 2017, Facebook said Safety Check had been activated more than 600 times in two years and had told people their family and friends were safe more than a billion times.

The work#

I worked on prototyping for Safety Check, the "Marked Safe" feature.

People use it under stress, in a moment they did not choose, so the interaction has to be right before it ships.

My role at BYND was front-end development with a focus on mobile web: building and testing responsive interfaces across phones, tablets and desktop.

Where it went#

Safety Check moved from a tool Facebook switched on to one the community could trigger. In June 2016, Facebook described how it had streamlined deployment around the world, and began testing community activation, where an alert from a trusted third party combined with people in the area posting about an incident could start Safety Check. By November 2016, community activation was how it worked.

It then grew from a status into a place to get help. Community Help, launched in February 2017, let people find and offer food, shelter and transportation after a crisis. In June 2017, Facebook added fundraisers to Safety Check, brought Community Help to desktop, and let people add a personal note when marking themselves safe. In September 2017, Safety Check, Community Help, fundraisers and crisis information came together in a single Crisis Response center.