Special tasks

A police officer today, picking up a Motorola radio, expects the same features as for many years, but also the simplicity and intuitiveness of today’s mobile devices and at least some of their functions.

This is a challenge for designers and developers, because beyond the reliability and well-known parameters associated with voice support, there is a whole new level for data, location, maps, video, or mobile network call handling. All of this should be designed in such a way as to provide the necessary information directly to the hands and eyes of the policeman, being an additional help, not a distraction. This is especially important in “emergency” situations, when the communication system is supposed to help, but in no case can be unnecessary ballast in such a situation.

It is the context that allows you to define your needs, how you work, and how you perform your daily tasks. For example, it is quite easy to conclude, observing the work of a police officer, that his hands should remain as free as possible during the intervention, but it is more difficult to answer the question: “What actions can the system help?”

Likewise, operator observation at headquarters would lead to the conclusion that the key in an emergency is to find information, arrange for assistance, and put the necessary information in the hands of the emergency services. The system should help find what is important at the moment and ensure efficient transmission.

Going back to a developer’s perspective, information in this regard is rarely available for more complex solutions. Therefore, he often has limited knowledge of how his code will later be written into the system. As such, it lacks what is critical, so that the title of five new lines of code, written by one person, could help as much as possible in saving someone’s health or concern for the safety of the user.

Context is equally important when creating test cases. There, the new code is checked along with the existing one and the requirements of the mission critical communication system are checked. It is in tests that a single functionality becomes part of a system consisting of radios, infrastructure, base stations, etc., so knowing the possible (and unexpected) use cases of entire ecosystems is just as important here as when writing the applications themselves.

Of course, the final verification will only be achieved by implementation in the real world, but all the previous steps are designed to maximize confidence that a fully functional tool will be obtained that meets the needs of the user.

A police officer today, picking up a Motorola radio, expects the same features as for many years, but also the simplicity and intuitiveness of today’s mobile devices and at least some of their functions. This is a challenge for designers and developers, because beyond the reliability and well-known parameters associated with voice support, there is…