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The Project

FIRE PROTECTION CONSULTANTS (www.fpc.be) is specialized in ‘fire protection’ and ‘live safety’ consultancy. In the area of emergency management FPC supports its customers with its software solution NoKeos (No Chaos). Designed by FPC emergency management experts, NoKeos is a very powerful Interactive Emergency Management Solution that assists organizations and government before, during and after an incident.

Incidents are dynamic events requiring a coordinated intervention of multiple parties. A lot of procedures, parameters and boundary conditions have a recurring pattern. These patterns can be pro-actively designed and embedded in a software environment for consultation during incidents. NoKeos integrates all this information and supports emergency response teams and incident coordinators.

The Challenge

An incident is a stressful situation. It requires full attention and all resources of the rescue-team members and coordinators. There is simply no time to lose, hence a decision support tool should be very intuitive and easy to use.

Former user interface issues:

• Complexity in screen layout: Links between related information weren’t always obvious;
• Complexity due to extreme flexibility: In the NoKeos Java-environment, it was possible to manipulate each module-window, so every user could customize his interface resulting in inconvenient screens;
• Suboptimal use of controls: Not everyone is very familiar with using a mouse and a keyboard. Suboptimal use of controls only makes things worse: Fields were often hidden, ribbons were invisible, and multiple tabs appeared on the same forms;
• The user interface didn’t support the working process efficiently.

(Click images to enlarge)

Our challenge was to straighten out all these issues without requiring major changes in the software’s architecture.

With the user interface overhaul, FPC wished to offer its customers a simplified and more efficient tool with a very short learning curve:

• Users have to be able to work with NoKeos with a very short learning curve;
• The incident manager has to be able to monitor one or multiple incidents via a simple dashboard;
• Executing teams need to have a clear overview of all their to do’s (executing tasks, update incident data…);
• Incidents have to be presented in a very dynamic way: The user’s attention needs to be drawn to updates of information and required actions without disturbing the working process;
• The user interface must have a professional and appealing look.

What we did

We started by organizing information gathering sessions where we invited real end users: the major of the Fire Department, the major incident coordinator and representatives from the crisis operations of the Police Department, Civil protection department and the ambulance dispatching center. Together with them and the FPC experts, we researched the complete former NoKeos application by using real life scenarios. It became clear quite early in the process that we had to design a major overhaul…

We started with a conceptual design

In a nutshell, our main focus was on:

• An incident-centered approach: Users tend to focus on an incident as a working unit. Therefore, all incident-related information is bundled together.
• Fixed and logical screen layout with limited personalization options.
• The toolbar functions as a dashboard and navigation tool. Loosely based on Jared Spool’s scent of information principle, the user gets visual support in drilling down in the user interface to the exact piece of information or controls he needs at a given moment.
• The ‘incident startup wizard’ is optimized to support the incident startup process.

(Click images to enlarge)

At the same time we crafted a solid navigation model

When using a very flat navigation model it’s hard to get lost in the application. E.g. users can open a detail-window simply by clicking on the item. This doesn’t sound like rocket science, but rest assured it is a major challenge in an application that offers complex functionality like NoKeos.

And then we dived into detailed design

After consolidation of the concept, we implemented this concept taking into account all requirements and usability issues. This was both challenging and fun, but more important, we made the users happy. After the presentation of the designs, one of them said: “This is a major leap forward in making the tool easy to use for the officers during a crisis situation.”

The result

Reactions during feedback sessions with end users (people of government, fire department, police,…) were very positive:

• “The lay-out is very logical and clear.”
• “This new user interface reduces the interaction-complexity with 90%. How come we couldn’t figure out this solution ourselves?”
• “The global overview is really what we need. All necessary information is visible.”
• ...

Related pages

Refer to: Services:Design for more information about user interface (re)design.