Designing a police dispatch dashboard: User Experience (INFO 246) university paper

User Experience paper at Victoria University

I completed a User Experience paper at Victoria University. Whenever I meet with people about new roles they always ask me to explain my process. My process changes based on the project and new ideas I want to try. Here’s the process I followed to complete the paper.

Week 1: Reading and note taking

1. Read the course recommended text books:
   1. UX Book (I don’t recommend this book, it is extremely dull and hard to extract information from)
   2. Universal Principles of Design (useful design advice)
   3. I prefer Don Norman’s The Design Of Everyday Things. It’s extremely thought-provoking and easily one of my Top 5 books of all time 🙂
2. Read through the course assignment (in this case, design a Police Dispatch system), made notes and rough sketches.

Week 2: User personas

1. Arranged to visit (e.g. contextual inquiry) at the Police Head Office in Wellington, New Zealand
2. Made a list of questions to ask the Police Dispatch Officer and emailed them to her ahead of time so she had a better understanding of the visit
3. Sketched out some rough ideas for a persona template
4. Finalised the text, colour and layout for the 3 x primary and 3 x secondary personas

Week 3: Contextual inquiries, wireframes and mind maps

1. Made notes based on my visit to the Police Head Office
2. Created a mind map using MindMeister to gather and organise all my ideas
3. Sketched out ideas for the rough wireframes and detailed what UI elements are required within the interface
4. Completed some workshops on how to use Evolus Pencil a low-fidelity wireframe tool
5. Designed a simple sign-in screen
6. Interviewed a Police constable about the call handling process from their end

Week 4: Sketching rough concepts and low-fidelity wireframes

1. Sketching and wireframing of 2 x concepts
2. Re-wrote the design brief into a user-requirement spreadsheet ensure elements don’t get over looked

Week 5: Design and prototyping

1. Finished the two wireframe concepts
2. Completed some workshops to better understand affordances
3. Designed a logo, the navigation and grid structure
4. Studied for the test and made notes
5. Various iteration on the design of the dashboard.

Week 6: Study and design

1. Went through the course book again and made study notes.
2. Found some time to work on the camera screens

Week 7: Design and prototype

1. Take a look at the dedicated Jobs and Units page
2. Completed some workshops on how to use the prototyping tool, Justinmind

Week 8: Iterative design and prototyping

1. Re-visited the new job page and completed the various interactions and alerts
2. Built a prototype to view test out the navigation and user flows

Week 9: User evaluation and fine-tuning

1. Created a user-evaluation form using Google Form to gain insight and to use to improve the finished product.
2. Experimented with a light and dark version of the map page

Week 10: Peer evaluation, user feedback and reporting

1. We evaluate each other prototypes and provide feedback on how their prototype could be improved further.
2. Created an evaluation report based on the feedback outlining what will be fixed to improve the prototype.
3. Studying for the final test.

Week 11: Improving the prototype

1. Went through the prototype and look at how I could improve the interactions to make it clearer how the end product would function.
2. Improved the map icons for units that were “on-scene”
3. Implemented the notifications drop-down.

Week 12: Tying up loose ends

1.  Studied for the final test.
2. Continued to polish the UI/UX of the prototype.

Designing for clarity under pressure

Police dispatch work doesn’t leave space for interpretation. When everything is urgent, the design has to do one thing well: surface the right information instantly, without adding friction or doubt.

What stood out most in this project was how quickly complexity turns into noise when too much competes for attention. The real design challenge wasn’t structure or layout, it was restraint. Deciding what should disappear so the important parts could stand forward without effort.

This kind of thinking shows up across my work in complex dashboards and design systems, where clarity and hierarchy directly affect how people make decisions in real time. I explored the same problem more recently on the Central Police Dispatch emergency dashboard, where the stakes were even higher and the margin for confusion was even smaller.

It’s a reminder that in high-pressure systems, good design isn’t about making things more complete. It’s about making them easier to see.