I work in a campus police department. For years, officers have written crime reports on Microsoft Access, which, while okay, isn’t particularly suited to the task. It can only be used on one computer at a time and is needlessly complicated for the straightforward information typically collected in a report. I was asked to come up with a design for 1) a simplified system, 2) that would be usable by multiple officers simultaneously, and which would also be 3) accessible from many locations, possibly even outside of the main command center. Also important to this particular project were accessibility standards; many officers complained of headaches related to eye strain after spending significant time in front of a bright monitor (the MS Access system used a white background with black text).
The first step was to sit down with a few officers and listen to them describe common reports and things they didn’t like about the MS Access system. Once I had a rough idea, I started sketching some screens on graph paper while they looked on. This was the first iteration of the simple system:
After some interactive testing, we eventually decided that the first design was too “screen-happy.” Rather than presenting a “main menu” after an officer logged in, we decided that it would be more efficient to immediately display the list of recent reports and include a link somewhere to add a new report (I say link instead of button because at this point, we had decided that the application would be primarily web-based to facilitate greater accessibility). I did a quick sketch of the home screen after login in Balsamiq:
From here, it was relatively easy to implement a PHP-based solution. The final design uses a darker blue/gray/green color scheme, which is easier on the officers’ eyes. Editable text fields are highlighted by thick green rectangles upon mouseover. The report list includes a CSS style to highlight an entire record based on the cursor’s vertical position. On the writing portion of the interface, the “submit report” button is huge and unmistakeable (a frequent complaint about the MS Access system). A demo of the final interface can be seen here (lacks some functionality).
