Description

The Public Safety Cognitive Radio (PSCR) is an advanced communication device for first response officers. This portable radio can be setup at the disaster location and be used to co-ordinate communication between the various agencies and departments. The PSCR scans and detects the communication channels in the area and presents them to the operator. It recognizes known frequencies and automatically classifies them. The operator will be able to edit or delete the unknown frequencies. The operator will also be able to transmit and receive information to and from any of the identified frequencies. It can enable any two departments to communicate with each other in a gateway mode.

My responsibilities were to conceptualize, design and test an interface for the radio that would be easy to learn and use.

Note: Due to the sensitive nature of this project, some documents and images can not be made available.

Tools and Techniques

• Requirements Gathering
• Contextual Inquiry
• Ethnographic Study
• Interviews and Focus Groups
• Prototyping
• Usability Testing
• Heuristic evaluation
• HTML, CSS, JavaScript & XML
• Macromedia Dreamweaver & Flash
• AJAX
• Camtasia
• Adobe Photoshop CS & ImageReady CS

Results / Outputs

The interface was designed after observing the officers work in a natural environment at various tasks. This stage was followed with interviews and focus groups to gain a better insight to their work procedures. A prototype of interface was then created and tested with police officers. The results of this evaluation were used to create another iteration of the interface which was then evaluated by usability experts and the combined results were used to create the final iteration.

The interface was designed in a manner that would allow the officers access to all information within two clicks. It was made highly modular, enabling them to hide any part that was not relevant to the current mission. Adding and editing information could be accomplished right from the main screen. All updated information (which was a lot) could be accessed at a glance (or hidden, if not required).

Gallery

If you are unable to view the movies above, please try these alternate links: UI Walkthrough | AJAX Prototype. If you are still unable to view these movies, you may need to upgrade your Adobe Flash Player

< Back to the portfolio                                                              ^ To the top