winter_2

One thing you can do with vast amounts of snow: building 3D mazes for ice-marbles. And yes, we actually do have sun in here in Umeå!

We are working on a 'design for sound' project at the moment: How to collect voices for a big music project. It will be done on Friday, so I might post some results soon.

winter

Umeå is covered with snow since I returned from my 2 week trip to Germany. It feels like a REAL winter, not that rainy, muddy German 4 month lasting November. The temperature drops to around -10 degrees, so it's not that cold (yet). Days are getting longer since end of December, it's almost 6 hours now.

Police Command & Communication Center - intro

After 5 intense weeks we finished the first bigger project. The brief was to come up with new ideas for efficient information and resource visualization in a Police Command and Communication Central. Starting with a team of 11 students in the research phase, we split up in smaller teams of 3-4 students after one week to focus on different aspects of the complex system.

It was a very challenging and extremely tight scheduled project, though very exciting for us as well as our client, the swedish police.

I want to say thank you my teammates Siri Johansson, Ayse Bor and Shelagh McLellan for the awesome teamwork and the great effort! Thanks to rest of the class, to our professor Niklas Andersson and to the project tutor Nils Erik Gustafsson, as well as to to all the officers and dispatchers of the Police who helped us throughout the project!

Police Command & Communication Center - research

The project started with a introductory visit to the Command and Communication Center (CCC) in Umeå. Being a rather small center it is still representative for a pretty modern working environment.






In a couple of sessions we conducted an extensive research by shadowing and interviewing the so called "dispatchers".

The working stations of the dispatchers contain tons of equipment: radio, telephone paper work and, most important for us, a PC workstation with an interface on 3-5 widescreen monitors. The dispatchers workload reaches from idle time to extremely stressful peaks were they have to handle multiple tasks at once (some former dispatchers now work as fighter jet pilots).
Of many hundred applicants a year only about three to four are suitable for the job. Mostly women.

The first challenge was to understand the whole system of emergency calls, managing ressources and dispatching patrols. It is a very complex system witch even more complex decision-making processes.


We got a deep insight on as the police officers patiently explained almost every detail. We had the chance to visit the CCC a couple of times, so we were able to build on a well-founded knowledge.

After the first week of research, the class of 11 students split up in three groups based on different opportunity areas.







I decided to team up with Siri, Ayse and Shelagh to work on the area we called "cooperative environment". We saw big potential in taking the whole CCC as a system to improve not only focusing on the screens itself.

Analyzing the interaction workflow was important to understand the interface and all peripherals in detail. The analysis revealed many opportunities and potentials for improvements, as shown later.

One excerpt of our analysis: The interaction flow during the case of a hit reindeer (which is super-kliché but very common in northern sweden) As you see, the dispatcher has to go crazy in the interface, as he needs to switch between three monitors all the time. This means turning the head a lot of times, and travelling (literally) meters with the cursor.

Police Command & Communication Center - ideation workshop

 After two weeks of research we developed two rough paper prototypes. Both were quite different to what the dispatchers are used to and we were pretty curious to test their reactions.

In a one-day workshop, in which police-officers and dispatchers participated, we tested the low-fi prototypes by playing through a quick scenario with them. We learned a lot of useful lessons, some of them were quite surprising, as many of the subjects were most familiar with some of the more radical approaches.

I had the opportunity to learn a lot about quick prototyping and early-stage user testing, which was one of the most important steps in the whole project.

As our group also addressed the whole room as an opportunity area, we asked the officers and dispatchers to show us how they like to work. We gave them a toolkit of desks, projection areas etc. to play with. By that we found out, that today's room layout is almost the opposite of what the people working in it want to have.

After the workshop we perused all the feedback and worked out a more detailed concept. We went through many iterations of wireframes like you see on the left, refining them more and more every step.

Police Command & Communication Center - final demo & user testing

For the second workshop we built a back projected prototype to come as closest to the final experience as possible.
We would have loved to have a fully interactive prototype, but that was impossible to do in that short period of time (10 days between workshop 1 and 2).












We prepared a case we played through with the police-guys: First we gave a 5 minute introduction to our interface followed by a crime event we simulated and the officers / dispatchers had react to on the interface.

The result was mind-blowing, as all of the subjects were able to conduct all tasks without any mistakes at the first attempt. Considering the fact, that the old system needs weeks to get familiar with, this was a big success.

The feedback on our approach of using a touchscreen paired with a special keyboard and a special communication device was really good. The concept improved workflow as well as ergonomics and provided a more compelling experience of use.

Police Command & Communication Center - animation

For the final presentation we prepared an animation showing the most important features of our concept. It is not optimized for external use, yet, so it's still four minutes long. The first two minutes give an introduction to the most innovative features, at 2:12 it shows an example of application.
I think i will prepare a condensed version for using in my portfolio some time...Hope you enjoy it anyways!