Cop-Aid is a Naloxone training app that provides on-site support for police officers in Opioid overdose cases.
Design a naloxone training app to help police officers learn how to use a 4 mg nasal Naloxone drug to save someone from an overdose.
Project Brief
Project Duration
Jan-Feb 2023 (2 weeks)
Role
UX Designer
Collaborators
Afreen Azad (Graphic Designer)
Investigated user needs, goals, and challenges in a 6-hour secondary research workshop that focused on behavioral observation.
Drafted 5 logic and decision flow diagrams to explore the primary user flow for the in-app experience.
Designed 11 high-fidelity app screens to conceptualize and communicate user navigation based on the Naloxone paper guide.
Contribution and Impact
The Problem
San Francisco has an Opioid crisis.
Mortality data from the CDC shows an increase in overdose death rates across the country, with San Francisco county reporting the highest rates at 80 overdoses per 100,000 people.
The Solution
Cop-Aid provides an efficient Naloxone training experience that reflects the tense pace of an Opioid overdose case.
Some of its key design features are:
Adequate screen surface area to afford right-to-left swipe motions.
Bold colors to create a strong contrast between text instructions and action items.
Large text to increase the visibility of guided instructions.
Use of icons to distinguish between the different steps in the paper guide.
How does the app work?
The app experience uses a logic-flow diagram to encourage active decision-making and quick response time.
The situation at the scene is usually categorized as hectic and fast-paced, leading to feelings of stress and panickedness for inexperienced police officers.
A slowed and tensed mental state could result in mistakes that have major consequences not only for their job but for also the lives of those they are trying to save.
Who are the users?
Police Officers, who are often the first to respond to cases of Opioid overdoses.
Knowing that the phone would most likely be placed on the ground during response time,
How can we design a screen interface that affords high visibility and responsiveness to aid training and accurate response?
User/Desk Research
Watching police body cam videos and Narcan training videos helped bring us closer to understanding the needs, goals, and challenges of police officers.
Based on our brainstorming, we wondered,
How might we equip police officers on Opioid overdose cases with an increased sense of adaptability and the ability to anticipate and respond to unexpected circumstances?
Our first visual drafts used breadcrumb navigation, bold visual icons, and CTA’s to alleviate information overload from the paper guide.
Concept Proposals
Proposal 1: A quick start guide with breadcrumb navigation to follow through the steps from the naloxone training kit.
Proposal 2: A response checklist meant to help police officers accurately follow through the steps in the paper training guide.
Initial sketches focused on simple swipe motions to trigger navigation between each step of the administration process.
Although the original concepts were focused on maximizing information accessibility, we faced a lot of challenges with contextualizing the app’s usage during Opioid cases.
Rediscovery Process
So we pivoted – opting to shift the user flow from generalized and scattered to logical and process-oriented.
Developing logic flows helped achieve this.
Logic Flow
A logic flow was developed to understand the flow of decision-making in the process of administering naloxone.
Decision points are represented by diamond shapes.
Rectangular boxes contain action items.
Multiple logic flows were drafted with considerations to time delays, happy paths, exception paths, and interactions with third-party stakeholders such as emergency responders.
These considerations helped with the placement of crucial decision points for police officers across the flow.
What did I learn?
Although I had known of the Opioid crisis in San Francisco, I found myself many times during this project, grappling with my lack of knowledge about the subject matter. Due to the time constraints that limited me from conducting field research, I found it vital that I did adequate background research and truly grasped the perspectives of police officers with sensitivity and seriousness.
The lack of focus on aesthetics and branding in the visual design made the design approach extra challenging as well. I had to tweak my existing understanding of app design and modify it to follow a logical flow with minimalistic layout choices.
The systemic nature of health challenges such as solving the Opioid crisis involves a more empathetic understanding of the interactions between relevant stakeholders– in this case, police officers and the people who receive support. This project was my introduction to the world of Health Design and I'm very excited to see what kind of health challenges I encounter in the future!
