Background
Currently in police precincts across the US, operational planners are tasked with generating resource allocation plans for the district they support in accordance with the chief’s priorities. Today the master policing plan is generated and briefed in Microsoft Powerpoint. It is usually signed off on and disseminated to various officers within the department for review.
Challenge
A police department based in LA county asked our team to modernize this process. We learned that there are many problems associated with having to gather information, plan & deconflict resources using Microsoft PowerPoint and that there may be gaps in leadership’s ability to make effective decisions because of the format they use today. Our' team’s goal was to deliver value to the user and the organization.
My Role
UX Design
Interaction Design
UI Design
My Team
Product Management
Product Design
Engineering
Our Process
Discovery of Problems & Prioritization
Their Process
Districts email support requests to planners.
Planners manage requests on Share Drives with Leadership.
All communication about requests, events and their status is done over the phone and email.
The process isn’t ready to support any higher volume of requests.
Concept Validation
Lo-fi Concepts
Concept Validation
After we generated some concepts from the ideation phase, we ran a series of interviews with our core user groups (police planners & leadership) in order to evaluate whether our proposed solutions were valuable and usable. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all feedback sessions were remotely moderated.
Major Takeaways
Despite some usability issues, most members in each user group rated the solution as being significantly more valuable than their current solution(s).
Both user groups found the timeline view to be highly valuable however indicated that they need a more “presentation” style display for briefings as displaying alongside planning UI was distracting.
Because our solution would be a web application, both the planners & leadership indicated that we may not need to include an export functionality as other consumers would be able to use the tool to view the plan.
Astro is a government-owned space design system. This system enables development teams to build rich app experiences and custom applications with established interaction patterns and best practices. Our team combines Astro and Material UI, a react component library developed by Google, to quickly developed mission unique apps.
Hi-Fi Designs: Map View
Event summaries simultaneously viewable next to map view.
Filter by date range, geography, and activity type.
Customizable activity icons for quick recognition/differentiation.
Dark Mode UI: Suitable for dimly lit offices that planners tend to work in.
Hi-Fi: Presentation Mode
Presentation Mode for quickly viewing activities over time.
Police units assigned to activity are displayed when activity is highlighted.
Timeline displays length of activity, overlap with other activities & summary information.
Clickthrough events (instead of auto-playing) to allow for discussion during briefings.
Some Metrics
Next Steps
Reduced the time planners spend to create a Master Plan by 80%.
The number of clicks to add one single event to the Master Plans was reduced from 56 clicks to 11 clicks.
Deliver a mission archive feature for planners to be able to reuse events.
Incorporate modal to gather user feedback.
Continuously iterate on and validate interaction & UI design decisions.