The Problem

In most agencies around the US, police officers respond to many calls a day and an officer may only have a few minutes to gather information on incidents. Today officers primarily rely on their memory and pen and paper to collect information on the scene.

Unfortunately this can be an error riddled process. In some areas in the US, more than 70% of reports were missing important data and more than 30% of reports contained errors. (1, 2, 3)

Police departments tend to be behind on technology and smartphones are only now being given to cops. There is a large opportunity to create new tools to support their job.

“Sometimes I don’t even recognize my own writing.”

— Pittsburgh Police Patrol Officer

Vivid

Vivid is a mobile app that helps officers capture information on the scene with greater speed, accuracy, and detail.

Collect Witness and Victim Information

Vivid helps accurately record critical data by scanning documents such as driver’s licences and automatically recording ID information.

If scanning is not an option, Vivid helps guide officers through a questionnaire of commonly asked questions. This saves time and reduces errors.

Support Interactions with English and non-English Speakers

Vivid allows officers to record and transcribe conversations with people on the scene. It also provides the required consent forms digitally.

Officers also frequently encounter people who do not speak the same language as them. Vivid enables foreign language recording, translation, and consent.

Simple, Fast Multimedia Capture

Officers can use Vivid to take pictures or videos of a scene, mark information on a map, and take notes on what they captured.

By capturing media instead of text, Vivid reduces ambiguity when referring to back to notes.

Take Notes Digitally

Vivid includes the basic functionality for taking notes on a smartphone. Officers can hand write, type, or dictate with voice.

By including simple note taking, Vivid accommodates an officer’s current workflow. They can use Vivid’s additional features as much or as little as they want.

Speed Up The Reporting Process

Officers can review the information they captured using Vivid any time on their phone or a desktop back at the station. We envision a future where Vivid integrates with an agency’s Report Management System to automatically fill reports and support multimedia data. This in turn helps reduce the time spent writing reports and the frequency of errors.

“I’m a big proponent of getting things down as quickly as possible [because] scenes change in an instant… there’s a lot lost.”

— Allegheny County Police Officer

“I see this having a place in our existing system, especially for new cops.”

— Allegheny County Police Officer

Project Overview

Our clients at Deloitte Digital approached us with the question: “What is the future of policing?”

We sought out to research, envision, and design that future.

My Role
Design, User Research

Client
Deloitte Digital

Project Duration
8 Months

Additional Deliverables
Research Book, Design Book, Project Website

Team Members
Irene Alvarado, Shannon Sullivan, Sriram Venkiteswaran, Vita Chen
Nancy Duan (adviser), Derek Wahila (adviser)

Research

Online Research

Coming into this project, none of the team had experience working in the law enforcement. We looked into the academic perspective of policing and how it has evolved till today. We also studied technology for police, both what is currently in use and emerging technology.

Interviews

We spoke with detectives, officers, community activists, citizens, crime analysts, and more. We also got to observe officers and detectives both in the field and at the station completing paperwork. This helped get us adjusted to how law enforcement works and to understand the many different stakeholders involved.

Ethnographic Research

To dive even further into the current state of policing, we attended community outreach events and ACLU citizen-rights meetings. We also participated in police cadet training and unconscious bias training.

Affinity Diagram

After three months of research, we used affinity diagramming to synthesize our research into design insights.

Shadowing

While we had officially moved onto our design phase at this point, the team continued to reach out to cops. They allowed us to ride along with them, sitting in their cars and watching them work the entire day. This was also a great opportunity to ask questions and run tests in their down time.

Design

Visioning and Sketching

We sketched and ideated with our clients as a way to collaboratively come up with design ideas to prototype. No idea was too stupid or crazy.

Storyboards

From the visioning, we were full of crazy ideas going in all directions, but there were way too many to work with. We created multiple storyboards to distill these ideas, showing them to officers to see which concepts resonated the most. Information capturing was one of the most best ideas.

Winning storyboard that would serve as inspiration for Vivid

Prototyping

We experimented with many different mediums for information capture such as VR, AR and tablets, ultimately choosing smartphones for their small form factor.

User Testing

We tested all the iterations of our prototypes with law enforcement and got great feedback. Some suggestions, like including voice notes, made it into our final prototype. Others, like collaboration and sharing, could be left for future work.

Outcome

At the end of this 8 month project, we held a pitch presentation to our clients. While we’ve been holding weekly syncs, it was great to get everyone together in a room and tell a story of how we went from “What is the future of policing?” to Vivid and why it matters. Afterwards, all IP rights and deliverables were handed over to Deloitte Digital.

Future Work

While Vivid innovates on how officers capture information today, there’s still much more room for innovation elsewhere. Here we’ve mapped areas we could intervene in an officer’s day to day as well as how we envision the future of information through the entire justice system.

Service blueprint of the future of information in the justice system