Project Overview
According to the 2023 Seattle Fire Department (SFD) Annual report, firefighters in the Seattle area are constantly experiencing an increase in call volume each year. With the constant influx of calls, especially due to drug overdosage, the response time has to decrease in order to aid more people more effectively. This leads to the question: how can we make the call to dispatch process more efficient?
Understand
Problem
With 206,482 total calls and 111,319 firefighter responses to the calls, the fire department are constantly in demand.
In order to help the fire department, we first have to ask: are there any bottlenecks in the current process? If there is, what/where is it?
The SFD’s report gave us a surface understanding of the existing tiered response standards and units’ geographic dispersal, but it did not tell us about the possible issues and friction that firefighters face during each mission.
We kept digging, in hopes of finding more information online, but couldn’t find more insight into the firefighter workflow.
User Research — Firefighter Interview
To get more information, we thought we’d go straight to the source. My teammates and I decided to go down to the Bowery fire station in New York City (where we’re based), knocked on the door, and get some answers to our questions.
Jeff greeted us at the door and invited us in to see their workflow and systems. With over 6 years of experience at the Fire Department of New York, he took us through the inner workings of a fire station.
We saw that the legacy system that they use for receiving emergency call information to know who and where to dispatch to is extremely complicated. It even took Jeff a few years to fully get the hang of it, and he said that rookies often need some time to adjust to fully understand the system.
The Lag Within Legacy Systems
The computer aided dispatch (CAD) software currently used my most firefighters in the US is a long-standing, legacy system that violates at least 6 out of 10 design heuristics.
Dispatcher Interface
Firefighter Interface
Although the SFD received 206,482 calls in 2023, only 51% of calls were processed within 60 seconds and 57% of calls had an emergency medical service turnout time within 60 seconds.
With drug overdoses, every second counts, and we saw the process of the dispatcher entering relevant information into the CAD system as a huge bottleneck in the system due to its innate complexity in design.
Ideation
Simpler Design Equals Ease of Use
We thought long and hard about how we can make the “call to dispatch” process easier and faster for the dispatcher at the 911 call center and firefighters. We realized that we had to simplify the system in order to make it easier to use: the dispatcher should know exactly where to input each piece of information and firefighters should be able to understand what as well as who is needed at a glance.
Dispatcher's View
Dispatch Screen
Status Screen
Status Screen
Reflective of Reality
At the scene, everyone should be connected and get all the information they need. Our CAD system will ensure that everyone involved will be as safe as they can be during the mission as they will get updates, according to the progress.
Firefighter's View
Dashboard Screen
Building Layout Screen
Map Screen
Seamless Report Generation
We want our new CAD system to streamline the incident report and historical tracking process, in order to decrease the amount of time and energy that go into handwriting reports.
Chief Firefighter's View
We designed the new CAD to summarize the incident automatically with the information provided by the dispatcher and the use of artificial intelligence. This will cut down the time needed to handwrite an incident report and allow dispatchers and firefighters to respond to more calls.
Easy On The Eyes
With dispatchers and firefighters needing to work long hours through day and night, we wanted to create a system that is visually appealing and easy to look at. Because we didn’t want to strain their eyes, we decided to go with a darker palette with black, grey, and blue.
Prototype
Screens and Flows
Because we were limited by time, we decided to focus on the dispatcher view from the beginning until end of an incident.
Try It Out Yourself
Go ahead and try out our prototype on Figma!
Reflection
What Went Well?
Although we were unfamiliar of the firefighting tools and operations at the beginning of the protothon, we were able to bridge the knowledge gap through holistic research online and clarifying in-person interview.
We all worked together well as a team by allocating tasks and regrouping to update and help each other.
Overall, I’m quite happy about the outcome as this is my second design protothon so it was rewarding and exciting to get second place for our track, against over 50 teams.
To Improve
I think we were a little too ambitious with the amount of views/users that we were considering at first, especially within such a short time frame. So next time, I want to be better at solving the core problem and showcasing it through a reasonable amount of flows.
The research and ideation process could have also been streamlined a little more, so that we would have more time to work on the actual prototyping part.