Feature: The Presenters' View of a UPA Meeting on Mobile Devices

We had been asked to talk about the design of mobile devices for police forces, an area we have been involved with for approaching five years. Here we provide a summary of the UPA experience as we perceived it...

The Preparation
As with the majority of our presentations, this talk took longer to prepare than we initially anticipated, which was partly due to the fact it was more than six months since we finished (and more than two years since we started) the project we were basing the talk around. This in itself made for an interesting exercise in reflection and analysis that helped us evaluate what we had learnt during the project, and really changed the direction of the talk from ‘what we did’ to ‘what we experienced.’

And so, we travelled to London by train from our office in Brighton to the Microsoft offices in Soho where we were escorted to the ‘swimming pool’, the space in which we were to present - a fascinating venue; one we weren’t sure whether the architects had meant to be a swimming pool, but then changed their minds, or one that was a design concept pushing the edges of the experimental.

These thoughts were a welcome distraction as, by this time, we were a little apprehensive about presenting to an audience of real-life usability professionals. However, after looking around, we happily noted that they looked well-fed (in a healthy way) and friendly, so we helped ourselves to the wine and began.

The Talk
We set the scene by talking about the high level issues that can impact on the usability and success of police mobile systems, for example battery drain, carrying, screen glare, user adoption and so forth, before getting stuck into the main body – our experiences of implementing a user–centred design process to develop a ‘briefing’ system for PDA. Much of our focus was on the practicalities of applying our methodologies within the police domain and how police work culture and work practice impacted on the design and implementation of the system. These discussions were integrated into the process of system development, which gave us the excuse to show off our Blue-Peter-style paper prototype mock-up of the PDA. This demo we began to regret as it stole the show a little – the President said it was the best he’d ever seen.

Overall, the size of the crowd, encapsulated in the bounds of the tiled pool walls, made it a perfect environment to discuss issues informally as we progressed – one might say it all went swimmingly (apologies).

The Aftermath
After the presentation we enjoyed our new found status within the group. We made sure that the paper mock-up was always in sight and, after polishing off the dregs of the wine, we headed to the John Snow pub at the bottom of the street. Here we happily chatted about all manner of things, but usability was always in the air. We found some fellow believers in communication being key to user adoption of any system (both laterally and horizontally across an organisation) and, after a business-card-swapping frenzy that we all got a little too excited about, we made our exit. After reflecting on our experience we agreed that we’d actually enjoyed ourselves immensely and would recommend presenting at the UPA to anyone who should get the chance. Thanks for having us...

Paul Hampton and Julia Higgins
Conspicuity Innovate

Associated Link: Conspicuity Innovate

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