Overview
In 2013, Colorado Senate Bill 13-226 was signed into law. This legislature was created and sponsored by a bipartisan group of legislators to help provide additional skills for officers who encounter dogs in the field.
A taskforce was created that was composed of law enforcement officers, animal behavior experts, animal control officers, training experts, and lawyers.
Part of this training was to provide an interactive training program that officers could run through on their own so that their departments could meet the training requirements of the program.
I worked alongside this team to help design and implement the training program.
My Role & Mission
I was responsible for designing the training, user experience, and the user interface. I also assisted in capturing video and photos for the training. I worked alongside all members of the taskforce including the lead engineer in order to implement the design.
Process
Initially, we met the project stakeholders to determine the project requirements. Part of the challenge with developing the training was that the various stakeholders came from very dissipate backgrounds and not all saw eye to eye. Some groups wanted the most basic training possible, and others occasionally disagreed on the proper methods for managing encounters with dogs.
We held various meetings both one-on-one with different members of the taskforce in order to get their direct input without interference, as well as in groups. While in groups we offered potential solutions as well as to help facilitate discussions. During these meetings I took notes and drafted the MVP course material.
From here, I created a series of low fidelity wireframes for pages as well as diagrams for the flow through the application. These were presented to the key stakeholders and approved by the taskforce.
Creation of the final teaching program also required videos and photos. I traveled to the various locations with the film crew and helped acquire film and video used in the final product.
Once that was done, I created a series of Photoshop mockups with final artwork.
I broke apart the final assets and exported those. I also edited and compiled the videos used in the application. This included both video and photography we shot during development, as well as some video and photography provided by third parties.
The initial version of this application was built with Adobe Flash and Flex and it used an XML framework for the course material.
The engineer on the project provided example XML for me, and I built out the course content and interactions within this. Matching, multiple choice, hotspot interactions, and video banks were some of the interactions officers used to learn inside the application.
Since the application was deployed, Adobe sunsutted Flash. I’ve worked with the original engineer to rebuild the course in HTML. I updated some of the graphical elements to match more modern aesthetics, as well as build the layout in HTML.
The coursework is currently deployed and still used to train officers in the state of Colorado.