Designing for Safety:
Crafting a User-Centric Public Safety App with Facial Recognition
Role: User Experience Designer
Background
NEC’s Facial Recognition engine has been rank #1 by NIST for the past few years, the challenge was to take that engine and build a global product around it.
Ask Calibrated Questions
The starting point depends on that we know, what we know we don’t know and what we don’t know we need to known, makes sense? With many unknowns, a good place to start when you don’t know where to start is a UX Canvas. The discovery started with stakeholder interviews filled with questions to that would help me fill out my UX Canvas and get a good idea of where we stood and where to go next.
UX Canvas
Insights
Business Problem
Users / Personas
Scenarios
Stakeholders
Solutions
Hypothesis
Outcomes
User Benefits
Validation
Competitors
Finding the right answers
At its core, facial recognition is a method for detection and authentication through biometrics. It has many applications, from payments, access control, security, to KYC solutions. I knew the use case was public safety but to understand who are the players? Where are they playing? and How are they playing? I needed know how the application would be used.
Main Scenario
1. Enroll
Known subjects must be enrolled into watchlists for future detection.
2. Detect
When a subject walks by a cameras and alert is presented to application UI.
3. Coordinate
Security guards must communicate to with location, subject information, and threat level.
4. Engage
The subject is stopped and questioned for further investigation.
Creating the foundation
We had good idea of what we are trying to achieve and the details would come as we start an iterative design, review, and adjust process. To keep the discussions focused on how the application will address the main scenario for security guards, I presented wireframes, and user flows to spark conversations and that lead to answers, but also more questions!
Early Stage Deliverables
LoFi sketching filtered bad ideas.
User flows to understand task complexity.
Wireframes to discuss core functions and structure
Abstract to concrete
Once we had alignment on how the application the would help a security guard in the main scenario, the look and feel of the application started to come together in a style guide and key screens designs for the engineering team to reference.
Style Guide
To reduce the dependency on mockups, a style guide was created to support engineering with quick on the guidance on application’s design.
Basic Elements
Advanced Components
Usability Testing
5 domain experience participants recruited.
Scenario based tasks were followed.
Feedback categorized as success, ok, caution, and fail.
Results
Participants completed main tasks but struggled with terminology and initial set up.
Outcome
The MVP version of the product was released to the SI team who work directly with customers, additional feedback received on improvement areas planned for release 2.