I’m currently doing 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 what I’m working on at the time and new ideas I want to try. This is the process I went through to complete the paper:

Week 1 – Reading & making notes

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 – 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 & 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 & low-fidelity wireframes

1. Sketching and wire framing 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 & prototyping (WIP)

1. Finished of the 2 x 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 & 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 & 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 and tweaking

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.

Try it for yourself

Feel free to play around and experience it for yourself – http://www.richmcnabb.com/archive/central-police-dashboard/

dashboards personas prototyping sketches ui university user experience user research ux wireframes