How can design improve the existing incident grids to enable dispatchers to allocate more accurate and faster unit assignments to 911 incidents?
PSAPs (or Public Safety Answering Point) are essential for emergency management, facilitating rapid response and public safety. Call takers assess emergencies and prioritize calls based on urgency while dispatchers allocate resources and communicate with responders. Sometimes, PSAPs have a combined role of telecommunicator.
However, challenges like communication breakdowns and information overload highlight the need for continuous improvement.
RapidDeploy's Nimbus product was not working in alignment with existing dispatchers but rather in contrarian patterns that impeded their ability to assign units to incidents (that needed to be opened, active, and closed).
This included:
- Unnecessary white space
- No guidance to the interface including the ability to right-click for actions
- Symbols without any alt-text upon hover
- Poor information hierarchy
- Use of critical colors for multiple elements, negating its urgency
An information audit, competitive analysis, and qualitative interviews were conducted in order to uncover the following pain points from dispatchers:
- Information overload
- Unclear urgency on incident
- Poor ability to filter incidents based on type (pending, active, past)
After extensive number of iterations and explorations, I shared the designs with the product team and dispatchers for their feedback to guide the future attempts.
While some of the earlier designs presented equally weighted tables for both incidents and units, feedback sessions revealed that dispatchers prioritized monitoring incidents above all other tasks.
Moreover, they even loved the combined view of both incident and unit grids. However, that was not able to be implemented due to the development and cost of resources and time.
MVPÂ designs of the separated incident and unit grid views were delivered to the product team via Confluence documentation and frequent check-ins with the development resource. The combined grid view was saved for future product iteration.
Real-time, accurate information makes the world of difference when it comes to making critical decision making during emergency services.
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I would have liked to have improved the micro interactions of the UI animations between status changes. I also would have liked to explore the use of cards over a data table.
