Dev sprint 9: New direction

What we did

Sprint 9 was about improving the granularity of the Crime Data Explorer experience. We sought to evaluate the value and feasibility of presenting crime data from an agency and city perspective and to surface key considerations to inform decision making.

• Conducted 8 research sessions with potential consumers of the CDE to explore and advance the agency and city perspectives.
• Built prototypes for assessing new navigation paths from the homepage and an alternative approach for displaying “all violent/property” crimes in a single view.
• Began laying the technical foundation for an agency-based perspective.
• Continued to improve the accessibility of the API by adding an overview that more clearly explains what to expect from the service and how to use it.
• Selected bug fixes & UI/UX enhancements.

Participants

• 18F team conducted 8, 1 hour remote interviews. Participants included product designers that have worked with crime data, a data scientist, CJIS staff, and several UCR program staff. We conducted qualitative research to gather feedback on the user experience for 2 distinct prototypes to better understand needs and expectations.

Learning goals

Homepage:

• Is the navigation model effective?
• How do users expect to navigate to cities?
• What information is valuable in rollover / tooltip?
• What do rates mean to people?
• What does SRS or NIBRS mean? How would you expect to find out?
• Is there additional information that is missing?

Explorer view:

• What are people's expectations around cities? What is their mental model.
• What information about cities is useful or expected?
• What does all violent crime mean to people? What is the value in displaying all the sub-categories of violent crime on one page? Is it overwhelming?
• What is your next question? What would you do with this information?

What we learned

• Consumers are interested in crime near them and think about crime in terms of cities, towns, and neighborhoods.
• Despite a shared interest in granularity, consumers don’t have a shared mental model about the geographical boundaries of cities.
• More granular perspectives can be perceived as “precise”, and can misleading without proper context. This has implications for how we approach granularity going forward.
• Users want to understand what agencies are covered in the data they are viewing.
• Additional information on the homepage distracts users from the navigational aspect of the map and the explorer view. Although valuable, the current design is confusing.
• State UCR programs see the CDE as a useful tool for submitting data and in some cases, expect real-time updates.
• UCR data experts are in a unique position to provide feedback about the accuracy of the data presented by the CDE and where we need to improve.

Next steps

• Move forward with enabling the agency perspective
• Include estimated data in the "explorer" view
• Expand access to the data via the API

Prototype tested

Prototype links:

Homepage

City perspective

Agency perspective