After a Disaster, Facebook Is Making It Easier to Find or Give Help

Facebook just rolled out a new feature designed to connect people in a time of crisis.
Named Community Help, it's part of Safety Check, the feature that allows users to mark themselves safe after a natural disaster, accident, fire, terrorist attack or other serious incident.
When people mark themselves safe in Facebook's Safety Check feature, they will be presented with an option to find help. Users will be able to connect with good samaritans on Facebook who are able to offer shelter, water, transportation, baby supplies, or something else. Users can also parse through the results in various ways, such as the number of people a good samaritan is willing to shelter.

 "Designing for such a large, diverse audience is an intimidating task because these tools need to work across a number of factors like languages, cultures, borders, network conditions and so on. Our team in particular faces the added challenge of ensuring that the tools we design can be used in difficult crisis environments where people are under extreme duress," said Preethi Chethan, a product designer on the social good team at Facebook, in a Medium post.