K
Socian
Technology
Interface Design
PROJECT OVERVIEW
AI police drones can be used to help 911 dispatchers to better prepare officers for when they are entering a scene. For this project, our team was tasked with designing a mapping interface or aspects of drone mapping that will be used by the drone dispatcher and potentially conveyed to police officers. This would be a map interface for future integration with Socian Technologies. Our project was primarily based on the exploration of drone mapping with a focus on first responder communication, general map and data visualization, vision sensor integration, rival drone research, artificial intelligence assimilation, and analysis of stakeholders.
MY CONTRIBUTIONS
I was included throughout the entire process of designing the interface. This includes secondary and primary research, sketching, creating wireframes and mockups, and testing. Through this project, I became more proficient at visuial design and testing.
PROCESS OVERVIEW
USER GROUP
Our user group for this project consisted of 911 operators, first responders, and criminals, but our main two user groups were:
911 Dispatchers
Pedestrians
SECONDARY RESEARCH
Our goal was to gain more insight into our problem space and to better understand how to move forward with creating designs that would accurately fit within our scope. We first wanted to learn more about 911 dispatchers and their current set up to learn how we could integrate our solution. We also wanted to see how drone mapping is currently done for other companies. We did this to see if there were any key points that we would need to add into our designs to make them as understandable as possible. We also conducted a comparative analysis to see what currently exists for drone interfaces. We looked at interfaces for non-autonomous drone cameras, as well as interfaces for drone mapping, that show the location and flight plan of the drone.
PRIMARY RESEARCH
In order to gain a better understanding and background of our user group, 911 dispatchers, we went to West Lafayette Police Department’s dispatcher center on Purdue’s campus. We interviewed a dispatch supervisor and the head of the WLPD drone department to understand pain points operators face when using CAD and interacting with maps, current implementation of police drones & situations they’re used for, and 911 dispatcher’s environment and job responsibilities.
IDEATION
With the information that we gathered from our research, we were able to ideate on some initial ideas that we thought would suit the problem space. We did this to visualize our ideas, so we could receive feedback form our sponsors and from usability testing. We ideated on Figma and the following are the designs that I came up with from our research findings. From this, we could conclude on our pain points and decide on a final design that would work best.
USABILITY TESTING
Our goal was to test out our designs with a dispatcher, to see how effective they were. We also wanted to test how easily understandable the designs would be for a 911 dispatcher. To do this, we talked to a 911 dispatcher over Zoom about our designs. We showed them to him and asked for any feedback on the things he appreciated and things that could be changed about the designs. Our main insights were that the map should add color-coded police units, add layers, and being able to change the visibility of the drone.
SKILLS
Interaction Design, Usability Testing, UI, Information Architecture, Design Research
TIME
5 Months
​
January 2023 - May 2022
TEAM
Kelley McTyer, Logan Carter, Faye Ochi, Garrett Fitzgerald, Rohan Pant, Aashika Parekh, Joe Maddux
TOOLS
Figma, Slack, Miro, Microsoft Word
FINAL DESIGNS
From our insights from the usability testing, we were able to create a final design to accommodate all of the changes we needed to make and new information from our sponsors. We used the initial ideas from the ideation process and made edits, to make a more finished design. The design consists of multiple screens conveying different drone information that would be useful for 911 operators.
