Team:Chris Demeniuk, Cheng-Lun Li, John Suciu

Background:

In the project of Emergency Response System, we designed the interface and interaction for the computer-aided communication among the fire Department, police, and dispatching center in Ann Arbor Township.

Design Process:

1. Conducted user and stakeholder interviews to understand the workflows, current communication channels, and identified the critical problems of collaboration.

2. Simulated a typical mission and experienced the frustrations using current technology under the hectic situations.

3. Produced personas and scenarios to model user goals, needs, and desires.

4. Created paper prototypes for usability testing. Gathered comments from users and refined prototype.

5. Created interactive prototype and implemented it on touch screen laptops.

6. Conducted field usability testing (for mobile console) and identified remaining usability issues.

Key Findings

a. Currently, there is no way within the current system for substantive data or information to be transferred between agencies, except for what can be conveyed via phone.

b. Since information is gathered and distributed manually, it is common for firefighters/ EMS to received overgeneralized or even wrong information.

c. Fire fighters, part of our target user groups, are still using paper-based documents, such as map books, first aid guides, and hazardous material lists, extensively. Precious time is wasted in looking for information. Moreover, the documents demand high maintenance cost and are often outdated.

d. Dispatchers not only assign units to incidents, but also play a crucial role in receiving and delivering critical information about the incidents to these units. Currently, there is no way for dispatchers to keep track of the information updates so they have to request the same information when losing track of current case status. This happens especially when they are dealing with multiple incidents at the same time.

e. The design of our interface (for mobile console) should have large input options and use high contrast colors. This gives users a easy control and strong visual cues, while they are constantly multi-tasking under noisy and urgent situations.

The Results:

Based on the findings, we built two interfaces for dispatchers and mobile console users (fire fighters and Ambulance drivers).

Interface for dispatcher system:: We realized that dispatchers often deal with multiple incidents at the same time. To greatly reduce their cognitive load, we designed an interface that allows them to sort information into different incidents. Besides, we designed a map interface that reloads according to incidents. In short, our design supported information categorization, real-time updates, and history tracking.

Interface for mobile console: Due to our project scope and timeline, we focused on designing for fire fighters. The major challenge in our design process was providing critical information and updates to users who are already performing other tasks, such as driving, and talking to the radio. We designed a touch screen interface with large buttons. The interface contains three tabs, each fulfills different types of information needs: 1. map with real-time location updates of other units, 2. incident information and 3. messages history. We placed a small flash light on the steering wheel so users are easily notified.

Responsibilities:

My responsibilities included conducting interviews, creating Personas and Scenarios, iterative prototyping and validating, and usability testing.