10-21 Police Phone Contacts Evaluation

See how we evaluated our contact-saving system and improved our users' dialing experience.

10-21 Police Phone

We set out to simplify our users' lives by streamlining a cloud-based contact book that keeps their personal contacts free of clutter.

Problem: Our users have to save work contacts to their personal phone that they will only need temporarily, and become difficult to manage as they accumulate.

Project Goals

Assess user's workflow around how they manage their work contacts and design a solution that elegantly allows them to organize the people they need to call.

Project Timeline

09/20-11/20

Responsibilities

User Research, Experience Design, Interface Design, Brand Identity

How did users originally manage contacts?

Before we embarked on this project, users would simply access their personal contacts through the app. In order to give them a better experience where they didn't have to sort through all their personal contacts, we had to do some research. We found that users are generally not dialing from their contacts because they do not want to save temporary numbers to their personal phone's contact list. In order to help address this pain point, while also helping them avoid searching for contacts in notepads or post-its, we hypothesized that adding a secure, cloud-based contacts list to the app would speed up their workflow.

ui before and after

Problems to solve for:

  1. 10-21 Police Phone's premium subscriber churn rate was a bit higher than we liked. By adding a contact list to the premium features, we hoped to add enough value to encourage subscribers to stay on.
  2. We needed more information on the user's journey from knowing they need to make a call, to their last interaction with that person. My hypothesis was that officers are most likely not dialing from contacts, but simply referring to hand-written notes. We needed to test that assumption and find out more about the user's needs.

Initial Exploration:

Our users need to be able to get in touch with civilians without life getting in the way. My goal for this project was to eliminate any mental distractions that could slow down or stop an officer from making an important call.

  • Hypothesis 1: Officers aren't taking the time to save contacts when they know they will just need to delete it from their personal contacts later.
  • Hypothesis 2: Users are writing civilian phone numbers down in their field notepads and then having to try to remember when and where they wrote down the contact number.
  • Hypothesis 3: Users would find it useful to be able to save a separate list of contacts that would allow them to digitize their notes about the calls and associate them with the contact's information.

User Personas:

Upon determining a general scope and outlining my hypotheses, I set out to define user personas for potential subscribers.

This rough sketch of potential subscribers attempted to outline potential user journeys for the typical officer. Initial feature ideas of note included the following:

Possible Solution/Feature to attract this Persona:

Separate, cloud-based contact list that allows the user to pin the most important contacts to the top. Allowing the user to have a separate space to save work contacts frees up their personal contacts, prevents them from accidentally calling from their real phone number, and saves them the hassle of searching around in a notebook for a phone number that may not even be legible.

Possible Solution/Feature to attract this Persona:

Officers are always on the go, and there are plenty of tasks competing for their attention. We hypothesized that adding the ability to take and save notes directly in the contact information card would provide two benefits: first, it would allow the user to provide context to their calls with the contact. Second, it would give them the opportunity to document their actions for their supervisors.

Subsequent Research & Narrowing of Scope

Once we had worked through and itemized our assumptions, it was time to survey!

I planned and wrote two surveys that will be emailed out to users based on their recent premium subscription status, and typical usage. These will be sent out separately, and will try to narrow down the typical user journey around dialing a community member as well as the rate of satisfaction with their premium subscription.

What We Plan to Ship:

v1 will ship a simple, user friendly contacts section that gives users the ability to organize their work calls with greater ease, visibility, and accountability. v2 will assess the user feed back and evaluate the success of the feature.