The Demex Climate Center ™
Web App (Demex) - 2021
The Demex Group is a design-driven startup specializing in risk management solutions, particularly tailored for insurers and businesses exposed to extreme but non-catastrophic weather events. Their design approach focuses on crafting innovative and customized solutions, including Operational Climate Risk Coverage and Retained Climate Risk Reinsurance.
In a world where financial losses from non-catastrophic extreme weather have surged significantly, Demex's design philosophy is to calibrate financial strategies to hyper-localized weather patterns. This approach minimizes underwriting losses for insurers and ensures corporate profit stability from their clients.
My Role
As the founding designer and also a full-stack developer at The Demex Group, I embarked on a unique journey when I joined the company in early 2020. With a startup in its infancy, I found myself in a pivotal position within the product team, allowing me to dive deep into understanding our users and product from the ground up.
My role was to create the Demex Climate Center, a free platform that empowers users worldwide with detailed climate information. This tool would enable business owners to safeguard their revenue against anticipated weather events, providing actionable insights and risk mitigation strategies.
What were we trying to solve?
In our journey to design the Climate Center, our primary focus was addressing the pressing pain-points faced by a diverse range of users, from business owners to policymakers. The Climate Center, a free public platform, provides a powerful solution to the critical need for in-depth climate insights.
Our design strategy centered around delivering accessible and comprehensive climate trend analysis for over 60,000 global cities. We recognized the need for a user-friendly, at-a-glance representation of localized climate trends and year-to-year weather variability, spanning essential variables like summer heat, winter chill, rainfall, and snowfall.
This approach was driven by the profound understanding that weather fluctuations impact every economic sector. From construction to agriculture and energy production, the American Meteorological Society's estimate of $485 billion in annual economic activity at risk due to weather variations underscored the urgency of our mission.
Our product design story revolves around creating a dynamic and informative platform that empowers users with over 650,000 unique climate assessments, helping them make informed decisions to safeguard their interests and mitigate climate-related risks. By incorporating a vast dataset into a user-friendly interface, we aimed to contribute to enhancing resilience in the face of unpredictable weather, and make a tangible impact on a global scale.
We utilized existing clients as well as Usertesting.com to gather a pool of 50 participants into our study. The insights gained from the study were crucial in guiding our design decisions down the line. Here's what we learned:
Business Disruptions
78% of surveyed business owners expressed significant disruptions to their operations due to unpredictable weather patterns, resulting in reduced productivity and increased costs.
Vulnerability
In agricultural communities, 65% of respondents reported yearly losses due to unanticipated weather events, with an average loss of 15% of their annual yield.
Insurance Gaps
63% of the respondents revealed that their existing insurance policies did not adequately cover weather-related damages, leaving them exposed to financial risks.
These statistics collectively highlighted the significant financial and operational challenges posed by unpredictable weather, emphasizing the critical need for a platform like the Demex Climate Center to provide data-driven insights and risk mitigation strategies.
Early Ideation & Wireframing
How can we make complex date easily identifiable?
This was a pivotal aspect of our project. Our goal was to develop icons that succinctly conveyed complex climate data, ensuring users could easily grasp and interpret information.
Each icon was thoughtfully crafted to represent a specific data category, facilitating a more intuitive and engaging experience for our users as they navigated the intricate world of climate trends and variability. These icons not only added visual appeal to the platform but also played a crucial role in enhancing comprehension and user interaction.
Great, our users have all of this data, now what?
We created a climate matrix to help users easily grasp how their data relates to other locations by providing a visual roadmap.
In this chart, the four corners represent the most extreme changes in climate trends and variability, offering a quick reference for the most significant shifts. The vertical axis focuses on climate trends, with higher points indicating recent increases in specific weather variables and lower points indicating recent decreases. Meanwhile, the horizontal axis addresses climate variability, with points on the left showing increased consistency and points on the right revealing recent variations.
