OVERVIEW
Parks push safety alerts and closures — trail closures, wildlife, weather, fire bans, evacuations, sourced directly from the managing organization or the NPS.
Creating and designing the system that classifies and surfaces real external safety feeds in a form a visitor can act on.
THE PROBLEM
A single park can carry 9–12 active alerts at once, but "alert" covers three very different things. Info changes your plan (campfire ban, permit change). Warning is a hazard to route around (bear activity, flood-damaged campground, road closure). Danger is an immediate threat to life (wildfire evacuation).
Weight them equally and the critical one gets lost. Bury them to protect browsing and someone hikes into a closed trail.
Alerts arrive from many organizations or directly from NPS in feeds we don't control.
THE QUESTION
How do you surface safety-critical information at every level of urgency, without drowning users or hiding the core experience?
THE APPROACH
A severity model where visual intrusiveness scales with real-world stakes.
Low-urgency information stays glanceable and out of the way; each step up in severity earns a heavier, harder-to-miss treatment; and the most critical alerts are allowed to interrupt everything. One coherent system, calibrated weight per tier, so the interface's insistence always matches the actual danger.
THE DESIGN STRUCTURE
Three fixed tiers, and a ladder that scales with the stakes.
The tiers are the spine. Every treatment reads off them and escalates only as far as the danger demands.
Most of it isn't an emergency.
Info and Warning carry the everyday at a weight that informs without interrupting. Closures get their own status pills.
HOW IT SHIPPED
From design system to shipped – fast.
The primitives already lived in our OuterSpatial design system, so the work was composition, not invention. I drove Claude Code through the Figma MCP to assemble the severity treatments straight from the live components, on-system by construction.
ACROSS SURFACES
Two form factors.
COVERED ON ALL GROUNDS – WHETHER YOU'RE AT PLANNING AHEAD OR ALREADY AT THE PARK.
WHAT SHIPPED
Severity decides how loud an alert is. Proximity decides whether you see it at all.
The result is one severity framework applied consistently across every surface of the app, the same alert speaking with the right level of insistence whether it's a chip on a card or a full-screen evacuation notice. It shipped on both mobile and web, so the model holds across two very different form factors.
FUTURE STATE
Adventure Mode
The system is also wired to real location context: with a user's permission, alerts can be tied to geofenced GPS data and surfaced by proximity, so the severity model doesn't just rank alerts, it can prioritize the ones near where the user actually is.
