Overview

The NSW Police Force partnered with RXP Services to upgrade it's community portal to a new advanced Salesforce platform while uplifting the current look and feel and usability. In addition to the existing functionality, new crime reporting and application categories were also added to the portal.

 Team

I was part of an Agile team consisted of a project manager, solution architect, business analysts, QA and technical engineers. Sprint ran for two weeks with daily standups, backlog refinement, sprint planning and a retro. Police SME's were also part of the extended team.

 Challenge

Reporting a crime can be time-consuming due to the detailed information required by the police. Visiting a local police station often adds to the stress for victims already coping with a traumatic incident. Additionally, police forces must allocate extra staff at stations to provide customer support, which can strain resources needed for responding to urgent emergencies.

 Solution

Provide an online portal where victims of (non-major) crime can report the incident, on their own time with guided support from the police force. Where no emergency exists and immediate investigation by a Police officer is not necessary, registered community members will be able to create online reports such as Lost Property, Intentional Damage or Graffiti and Theft, in their own time anywhere where an internet connection is present, using devices of today’s technology.

Discover

With project leadership prioritising technical delivery over UX (plus tight deadlines), I had limited flexibility to conduct full UX sprints. While the engineering team focused on establishing the Salesforce platform's foundation, I shifted into discovery mode and conducted some research activities:

• Analysed google analytics and customer feedback received for Community Portal phase 1

• Analysed existing crime reporting process to identify pain points and opportunities for improvements

• Interviewed subject matter experts (SME), frontline police officers and gathered insights into current process

• Conducted competitor analysis into similar crime reporting portals (e.g. QLD Police portal)

• Visited and interviewed Police Customer Service Representative (CSR) at Wollongong emergency call centre. Observed how customer complaints are received, prioritised and managed

• Develop personas and archetypes to define users' needs, behaviours, and motivations, and create journey maps to gain a comprehensive view of the user experience

Design

Wireframes and a prototype

Using Axure, I designing forms for each reporting type (e.g., break and enter, theft, lost property, etc.). Given the complexity of the required information, each form was structured as a guided wizard with a "save and continue" option, allowing users to complete the process at their own pace. Each form design was then reviewed with Business Analysts and Police SMEs to ensure all necessary fields from the current paper forms were accurately incorporated into the online format.

Test

There was no budget set to recruit and conduct external user testing. Therefore I did several rounds of user testing internally to validate the proposed design to uncover any usability issues and opportunities for improvement.

Develop and deliver

Collaborated with engineers to build the user interface with Salesforce Lightning UI and assisted the QA engineers to test the end-to-end flow for each report type.

NSW Community Portal is now live and used by the residents of NSW to report minor crime incidents. Work is already underway to add more report and application types which will be available from September 2020.