Digital Case Filing

Mark43, 2023

Empowering law enforcement agencies in the UK to digitally file and manage court cases.

Role

Product Designer

Team

TPM, Dev (2), Global Services (2)

Timeline

4 months

Mark43 is a public safety platform that provides tools for police, fire, and emergency agencies. This includes modern records management, computer-aided dispatch, and analytics tools that help departments streamline workflows, share information securely, and improve operational efficiency.

Overview

The Challenge

Public safety agencies in the US, and globally, need to be able to submit investigative cases to courts in order to bring suspects to justice. The current Mark43 records management system (RMS) has no feature for digitally handing off these files, requiring users to use long, tedious manual processes with high error rates. This feature is also a requirement for customer launches in the UK.

I partnered with product, engineering and global services to define and design digital case filing for the RMS.

The Solution

I designed a case filing wizard that allows users to aggregate data from our platform into a Case, to then send this data, through an integration to local courts.

Deliverables included:

  • 2 on-site research and discovery sessions, with recordings and synthesis

  • Case filing wireframes / mockups

  • Data model visualization handed off to the integration team

  • Customer sign-off on initial direction

Prototype of digital case filing wizard

Discovery and research

We kicked off discovery and research during an on-site customer visit in the UK, where I led a workshop with 8 participants to understand the current state of case filing and its associated pain points. These included:

  1. PDF forms in the same case share duplicated information, manually entered for each file

  2. Police Officers send cases forms too early to the court, bypassing QA/approval

  3. Follow up requests/tasks from the court are often missed by officers

  4. The QA process is not linear for every case but dependent on factors such as whether suspect has already been arrested, bail timelines, availability of supervisors, etc.; the system doesn’t currently account for these scenarios

After synthesizing this research, I was able to build out an initial user flow. This was valuable in identifying knowledge gaps for future research sessions, and was used in a larger effort to create a journey map of UK-related projects across all of our system platforms. Personas involved in the process include:

  • Police Officers

  • Department Supervisors

  • Case administrators (QA)

  • Lawyers at local court

Case filing user flow across 4 users groups, in 2 integrated systems

There were two additional research and discovery sessions held where I prepared interview guides and walked customers through the user flow for validation. All sessions were recorded, with participant permission, and uploaded to Dovetail, where I tagged and analyzed findings, and shared these with the product team. This allowed us to refine scope, and craft appropriate user stories.

Dovetail analysis of research sessions, with tagged/highlighted findings; blurred to protect customer privacy

Ideation

There were two major product concepts to figure out for this project – UX/UI for DCF and the data model for the integration between Mark43 and the courts. To begin, I came up with high level categories for design needs that would allow users to:

  1. Create a new case

  2. Edit a case file

  3. Send ‘messages’ to the courts, from the case file

  4. Manage a case file load

Building on our existing digital investigations, users would be able to package data and submit to the court via integration.

Relationship between investigation, case, and messages sent to/from the courts

I brainstormed an initial set of design options via rough mockups and sketches, thinking through pros, cons, and level of effort for each, and presented these to product and engineering for feedback.

Design explorations, presented to product and engineering for feedback

The feedback sessions allowed me to identify user, business, and engineering constraints that were important for the final solution. These included:

  • Data tiers - interface can surface entities but not ‘add’ new data at a 3rd level (investigation > case > message); this meant that users would have to be limited to adding relevant info at the case level and not when preparing a message

  • Case creation UI - users would benefit from a dedicated ‘create case’ space to focus their attention, reduce cognitive load and facilitate the QA review process by allowing reviewers to have a dedicated review space

  • US & UK compatibility - the chosen direction should be applicable for all customers with case filing needs

DCF Data Model

I also partnered with engineering and our Technical Product Manager to break down the case filing integration’s data model – understanding interface implications of objects and fields, and thinking through the optimal information hierarchy for these. This was necessary in order to give this data some structure and to unblock engineering from getting started on the integration before final designs.

Preview of data model and initial thoughts on information hierarchy

Almost there…

I explored a few different layout options for the case creation/editing space and after another round of internal feedback, moved forward with the ‘guided wizard’ option that would surface existing data for users and guide them through each step:

Design layout explorations for selecting case content

Concept Validation

I worked quickly to create a prototype for validating the UX/UI and data structure by applying the established design system. I then prepared a research plan for moderated design validation with our customer in the UK (and eventually others in the US).

Prototype where users select/confirm the relevant entity date for the case, and then prepare a message to be sent to the local court.

Findings

Customer feedback on the case filing prototype was overall positive! A few preliminary findings worth sharing include:

  • Evidence and Attachments must be linked to the person entity they belong to

  • All victims and witnesses in a case must have an attached statement

  • Users were confused by ‘case summary’ as a navigation category

  • Messages, Action Plan, Hearing Information and History are not related to the case building process and may need a different visual treatment in the navigation

Celebrating small wins with the product and engineering teams!

Design validation with customers allowed us to move forward with the ‘wizard-style’ case creation process:

The case wizard guides users to select from pre-filled datathat are relevant to the suspect and charge

When ready to send a message to the courts, users select the message type and then add/edit information as needed.

Conclusion

Project Challenges

  • Domestic + international workflows - different processes but one goal; the solution had to fit both needs. Further domestic testing is still needed but I leveraged internal case filing experts on US-process to validate initial direction (quick 1:1s to walk through user flow and design direction)

  • Core functionality vs configurations - I was unclear on the extent of configurations for cases so I partnered with our PM and customer experts in global services to identify core needs to case filing, separating these from what would be configurable for each agency

  • Tight timelines - product and engineering had to align on timelines to ensure delivery of this feature; this meant many syncs to plan and scope out the work, breaking it down into smaller deliverables for handoff. This was done during a recurring weekly sync, and other ad hoc meetings as needed

  • Lack of clarity in product requirements and user stories - this meant the need for multiple research and discovery sessions where I then analyzed findings and shared with the Technical PM for developing the feature spec

Success Metrics

We measured the success of this project through the aligned vision of the prototype to the larger user flow, and through meeting the requirements set forth by the UK government for case filing with local courts. 8+ participants were enlisted in research, discovery and design validation, across multiple police departments in Northern England – all of which were positive about our proposed solution.

This brought us one step closer to unlocking expected $ARR from 2 UK-based agencies (with payment milestones upon delivering requirements like case filing).

Next Steps

The case filing project is large in scope but we established a foundation for further design and development. Sadly, I was part of a round of layoffs at Mark43 and could not see the project through but if I had continued, next steps would include:

  • Case dashboard - creating a space for users to manage assigned cases in bulk

  • Redaction - some data must be redacted before sending through the integration; this is an existing pattern but we’d need to apply it to case filing

  • US-based customer validation - case filing in the US is less complex than the UK but more domestic customer validation is still needed