With the introduction of a new location tracking capability within the ArcGIS platform, the web team needed to create an application that would allow organizations to create, manager, and analyze the location data collected from the mobile app.
Users privacy and data security were key factors driving our solution. We also needed to make complex spatial data analysis approachable and understandable for non-GIS users.
Primary use cases for the application were situational awareness and last known location tracking. Our product was used by security, law enforcement, medical, and event staff at the Rock-n-Roll Marathon, the Super Bowl, and Mardi Gras.
I was the sole designer who owned and guided the the user experience of the web application, from its first inception to a delivered prodction enterprise product. This included working closely with one of the company's chief cartographers to understand the priciples of designing map data and then applying a user-centered interface to analyzing it in real-time.
Cross-collaboration the native application team building the client application ensured that we were creating a seemless and cohesive experience.
Sketching early on was a huge part of figuring out the direction for Track Viewer.
We knew the large features of the app and a basic idea of how we wanted it to be used.
Sketches ranged from overall interface framework, to filtering, to project configuration, to data visualization.
One of the unique learning experiences from this project was that I got to work closely with one of the company's best cartographers.
This was an area that I had very little experience in, and I was an admirer of his work. So I took the opportunity to reach out and talked him into mentoring me on this aspect of the project.
With his guidance, we worked on creating a unique color palette for the track, filtering visualizations, incorporating directional information, determine map scale, and more.
One of the features the team was really interested in building into the app was based on geofences for situational awareness.
The idea was that the supervisor could create zones using map drawing tools and then add alerts that would show up on the mobile device whenever their field workers entered or exited one of these zones.
I worked with the product owners to identify some key customers who we thought would use this feature. These customers were in law enforcement, fire and rescue, and child protection services.
After reviewing detailed prototypes with the company's executives, the feature got shut down as the team couldn't satisfy the legal teams concerns over liability. We had focused too much on use cases where timing could be critical in matters of life and death, and the technology wasn't there to support it at the time.
In the end, this actually helped us focus on the core problem space which was the location awareness aspect.
