Lately we were approached by the Merhav Haim team at Dror Israel — a team responsible for emergency management across multiple related NGOs, including the Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed youth movement, which runs events with tens of thousands of participants.

They came to us asking for "an app" to replace functionality that had long been handled using pagers. And this wasn't the first time a prospective client had asked us for "an app" — that's what most people picture first.

But once we began gathering requirements and specifying a solution, it quickly became clear that an app was not the right fit for more than 95% of the users.

What they really needed was a fast, reliable way to report incidents — ideally with added context such as location and images. Requiring every guide to download an app, keep it updated, verify it works on their specific device, and rely on it exclusively during a potential emergency was simply too high a barrier. Especially since a large portion of the users are young guides who rotate on a yearly basis.

That's when we were reminded of a fundamental product and UX principle: meet users where they are. In this case, that place was obvious — WhatsApp. Every user already had it, knew how to use it, and trusted it.

A hybrid solution instead of one app for everyone

• A dedicated app for emergency response managers — a small, professional team — allowing them to view, prioritize, manage, and respond to multiple incidents.
• A WhatsApp-based bot for everyone else, leveraging familiar interaction patterns, automatic metadata (who opened the case), built-in capabilities (images, location sharing), easy multilingual support, and automated flows for low-priority incident reporting and data collection.

Takeaways

• Meet users where they are. Don't force people to install "yet another app" when existing tools already solve most of the problem better.
• The right solution is often smaller and more targeted than the original request. Build specialized tools for power users, and frictionless entry points for everyone else.

If you need help building robust WhatsApp bots or production-grade business solutions, we're here.