Motorola Solutions Safer School System

Envision the future of school safety

Overview

Unfortunate events (e.g. active shooter incidents, natural disasters and fires) and undesirable activities (e.g. drug dealing, bullying and vandalism) take place in and around schools. Safety and security are critical for academic institutions and public safety agencies alike. The project aims to envision solutions to improve monitoring and response capabilities, thereby enhancing the resilience and collaborative potential of school stakeholders.

During the sumer of 2018, I worked as a UX Design Intern in Motorola Solutions - a technological solution provider in the public safety space. I teamed up with my fellow intern working on the school safety landscape envisioning and designing solutions that help establish a safer school environment. The project was supported by Motorola Solutions User Experience Team and Business Strategy Team. As a team of two, we worked closely on exploring the problem space, discovering stakeholder and user needs, proposing, prototyping, and refining a systematic solution.

My Role

My effort included leading the stakeholder and the competitive research, defining the end-to-end solutions, and devloping prototypes for both the software and the hardware component.

Tools & Methods

Sketch
Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop
User Journey Mapping & Brainstorming Workshop

Project Milestones

Problem Disovery

With an extensive stakeholder interviews, competitive market landscape research, and learning about standard safety procedures, we identified a series of problem areas and potential opportunities for improvement and innovation.

The key problem areas we identified are as following:

- Information Collecting & Sharing: There is a lack of capabilities to detect early indicators of threats and therefor unable to mitigate potential problems. Additionally, information is split across multiple channels and passively processed and utilized.

- Decision Support: School personnel has difficulty making accurate and timely decisions in a high-stakes environment. They also don’t have an accurate perception of potential threat, therefore relying heavily on human judgment during crisis.

- Communication: There needs an effective way to enhance communications between risk management control teams and personnel on site (e.g. location and well-being of personnel as well as the status of activities) to mobilize resources effectively

Solutions Illustrated by A Storyboard

Ingress Data Explorer enables user to explore and validate data with a series of data discovery functions. The exploration process allows user to gain a good understanding for the unique elements of the data such as value distributions and outliers to inform the data transformation and analysis. User can submit search queries, filter data by any fields, view the source document data, and have visual summary of the data. This is a great point for both initiating and validating a data preparation workflow.

Final Solution

A centralized intelligent system that connects 5 key pieces of software and hardware along with different groups of school personnel users. By dividing the responses to school safety incident into 3 main stages, the intelligent school safety system is able to adapt to the context and trigger the respective software/hardware pice to provide users with the decision and action support.

To comply with certain restrictions, unfortunately I could not share more of the design details publicly online. However, I would love to share the detailed project process and the design iterations over an interview or a private setting. Please feel free to reach out for more details: yanlingx0919@gmail.com

Learning & Takeaways

Embrace Ambiguity

Move forward without knowing all the answers. Don't wait for permission, always be consciously curious and proceed forward with the best intentions. Keep thinking and pushing new ideas.

Ask Right Question

Even though many of the questions have no answers, but asking these questions have allowed me to better understand the scope, identify the opportunities, and make sure we are not creating new problems.

Prioritize Ruthelessly

Keep designs simple. Do not overload users with too much information. Define the critical user journeys early in the process and question every step or screen we create.

Manage Feedback

Get feedback often and early throughout the process. Don't be afraid to show incomplete or unfinished work to the team. Be humble, and try to understand different perspectives from different stakeholders.