Between March 2022 and August 2022, I helped as a UX & UI Designer on Česko.digital's project "Place at School" where our goal was to provide a tool to help Ukrainian refugees find place at school. The website uses UMapa as its base "map app" and data provided by Ministry of Education. For the design, I cooperated with experts from the Ministry and renowned PAQ Research agency to come up with a simple "heuristic" built-in to prevent social separation of Ukrainian kids among Czech ones.
Design challenge was to come up with least technically demanding solution (that is why we didn't develop our own "map browser") and be most efficient to deliver "something" ASAP to the refugees; that is why before developing a site on our own domain, we worked with people in UMapa that was already in use by the Ukrainian refugees to improve UX of finding schools on their main page and only then made our own "wrapper" that makes it even easier to filter down the schools: based on a pupil's age, the app recommends matching grade in the Czech school system and shows schools in the area that accepts new pupils to the particular grade. Another added value to UMapa is provided information about the Czech education system.
This project was created in Česko.digital community; special thanks to Tomáš Bederka, who came up with the idea, Jan Štefanides, who patiently kept asking the Ministry for the data and processed them and was the heart and soul of the project, Serzh and Marina, two awesome FE devs we made the site live with 💙, Michal Strnadel, who joined later and e.g. tested the app with users and our project manager Iveta Svatošová.
If you're interested, I had a lightning talk about the project at a UX Monday event.