Atypical user research for the Antwerp police force
talk – 35 min | Feb 6 – 14:00
Touch screens in fast moving vehicles: providing a great user experience
Spring 2016, Digipolis Antwerpen designed a new connected police vehicle for the Antwerp police force. Test vans contained dedicated touchscreens that allowed users to access FOCUS: a digital platform that supports field officers on the job. Passengers could use this interface while the van was headed towards an incident.
This specific context confronted us, the FOCUS UX designers, with very specific design challenges. Which environmental aspects influence the usability of a touchscreen in a police van? How do you optimize the physical installation of the screen? What are the optimal font and tap target sizes?
During this talk, we will tell about our approach to define design guidelines for this specific context. We’ll discuss the contextual problems, our assumptions, the research plan and test setup. We’ll give a closer look at the user test execution and will end by sharing our findings and guidelines with the audience.
About the speakers
Wouter Bridts
I studied Product Development at the University of Antwerp. Nowadays, I like to call myself a ‘Digital Product Developer’. Wherever physical and digital interfaces meet, that’s where I want to be. As an UX architect at Monkeyshot, I make sure digital products are built on a sound logical structure and are easy to use. In my years at Monkeyshot, I helped clients like Sport Vlaanderen, Local Police Antwerp and Johnson & Johnson create meaningful, useable digital products.
At the Antwerp local police force, I work closely together with Business Analysts, Developers and other UX experts to define styleguides, components, flows and specific page layouts for the FOCUS application. To make sure we get a top-notch user friendly end result, the other UX experts and I use different techniques: observations, desk research, user testing with real end users,… As a result, one of the main selling points of FOCUS is the excellent user experience.
Joke Van Kerckhoven
I am a User Experience Architect with a passion for user research. During the past 10 years as a consultant, I’ve helped more than 40 different clients to create excellent digital experiences by thinking from a user’s perspective. I love crafting qualitative user research methods, executing research, running workshops, and converting results into outstanding designs that truly fit the users.
Since 2015, I am the lead UX expert of the Digipolis Antwerp team that is responsible for FOCUS, a platform for the Antwerp police force. I conduct user tests and observations on a regular basis, create wireframes, design UI components and behavior at pixel level, and watch over a coherent user experience of the different FOCUS apps.
