Watchdog — Interaction Design Capstone project
The problem:
People who live in rural areas are often the victims of break-ins, burglaries and other crimes. When they report these crimes, it can take some time for the police to show up to take a victim statement. At this point, the perpetrator(s) will be long gone and any details of the incident may be forgotten.
The proposed solution:
I wanted to come up with a way for victims to easily and efficiently record as much relevant information about a particular incident as they possibly could. In addition to that, I wanted them to have the ability to collate all that information into a report that can be sent immediately to any desired friends, neighbours, family members or authorities.
I believe that a solution such as this would help rural communities feel safer as they are all being kept informed with up-to-the-minute information. I believe the improvement in the quality of reported information would also help catch criminals and prevent further crime.
Ideation
I took inspiration from several existing apps and websites when coming up with possible features.
Paper prototyping
I worked on a number of paper prototypes to try to establish the flow of the app. I found these particularly useful as they allow you to take a look at the app as a whole and it becomes pretty easy to spot gaps in the interface.
Wireframing
After creating the paper prototype, the next step is to refine the design into a functional wireframe. At this point, those gaps in the interface would being filled, with the goal being to make sure a user to pick up the prototype at this stage and successfully complete a number of tasks.
Testing the prototype
Before moving on the a final, high fidelity design, I needed to test the app out with real users. While I had spent some time refining the design myself, testing it with others would enable me to pick up on any usability errors I may have missed while also creating the potential form completely new design opportunities.
After conducting these test, I learned that some aspects of the design were not quite as intuitive as they should have been. For example, the “Create an Alert” sequence was initially a free form task which allowed the user to switch between a couple of tabs and complete it when they were ready. However, this was not clear enough to some users and in the next iteration I revised the design to be a more guided start-to-finish type task.
The final prototype
After correcting any issues I found in the testing phase, I moved on to creating a brand and final prototype. I chose the name “Watchdog” as I wanted it to have a real-world connotation, making it easy for people to understand its purpose.
