“I wish to share my expertise and work with my coworkers.” - Roxy van de Langkruis, Project Coordinator.
Our aim was to collaborate with the police and design a tool that will enhance knowledge sharing and collaboration.
This project proved to be difficult because there were many stakeholders involved from different hierarchy levels, and they all wanted different things.
In the end we decided to take a bottom-up approach. We involved to users with the strongest case, but still collaborated with other stakeholders too.
Our aim was to involve the user as much as possible, which is why we made use of the co-creation technique.
Throughout this project, we employed human-centered design methods by closely collaborating with the police's "project managers."
Our user research began with distributing a survey containing 17 questions—both open-ended and multiple-choice—to be completed in 10 minutes.
This survey helped us gather information about their current work processes and daily activities.The survey then led to six one-on-one, in-depth interviews, each lasting 60 minutes. These interviews focused on various aspects such as their roles, project management practices, collaboration, tool usage, and their ideal platform.
The primary aim of the interviews was to uncover the project managers' needs and frustrations, maintaining an objective approach throughout the discussions.
We analysed several platforms in the field of project management, payments tools, knowleedge sharing tools and other simimlar platforms. During the analysis we looked for positve patterns and elements we think can fit our user’s needs.
Opportunities:
- Most tools start with an overview of different projects.
- a spotlight on projects in order to engage more with the user.
- Guided user journey through process bars.
- Communication vie the tools decreases e-mail contact.
Gaps:
- Not all tools pay attention to collaboration.
- Lack of indication of the difference between projects.
- Some tools can be too technical, and thus less accessible.
After identifying the needs and frustrations of the users, we deepened our collaboration through a co-creation session. This session aimed to gain further insights into what the target group desired from the platform, specifically focusing on their most critical needs and their prioritization.
The session included three main activities:
- Priority matrix to categorize their needs and frustrations.
- Dividing the input into three main pages.
- Building a demo page to visualize potential solutions.
This process uncovered new insights and validated previously known ones, culminating in a comprehensive list of outcomes. The chart included below highlights some of the most urgent and high-impact needs validated during the session.
In order to show the functionality of the concept I created an flow diagram with the main user scenario. The diagram outlines the mains flows of our 3 main pages - Project overview, project page and personal page.
After we constructed our flow, we started working on creating the low fidelity wireframes for that. These wireframes were later tested with our users as well, in order to validate our choices. In the images bellow I will show some of the wireframes we created for the “Project Overview”, “Project Detail” and “Personal Page”.
The home page of the platform, where all the projects are shown.
Another variation of the same page, serving the same purpose.
This is the page where a user can upload a project.
This is a page specific to a chosen project, where you can read the whole report about it.
This is an overview of the user's own projects that he has done or are still in progress. They can choose which ones to make public and which ones to be like a draft.
This is a variation of the same page.
For the high-fidelity testing of our platform, we conducted one-on-one tests with five future users, each session lasting 30 minutes. We tested three specific pages: ‘project overview,’ ‘project detail page,’ and ‘personal page,’ focusing on their interactivity through task execution over a Teams call.
Key Insights from Testing:
Conclusion: The response to our high-fidelity prototypes was very positive, indicating only the need for minor enhancements, particularly in improving consistency of smaller elements.
The Dutch police force is vast, and many different people work there. For the scope of our project we mostly focused on the project leaders, however the long term goal of the police is for this tool to adopted throughout the organizaztion.
With this in mind we created a booklet that tells people the story of this platform, why it is there, and also assists onboarding. We created both digital and printed version of the booklet.
Curious to know what else I've work one? See my next project below.
