My role & responsibilities

As the Lead UX Researcher, I collaborated with the product team and design director from the start till the end of this project. Time Spent – Approximately 2.5 months. My responsibility:

• Drive the user research efforts, ensuring that every decision was backed by user insights. The project started as a vision sprint, but quickly evolved into a comprehensive discovery phase. I worked to gather data from real users through various qualitative research methods.

• Worked on the design concepts and data visualization for the prototypes we tested.

Product Impact

90% Increased user adoption intent with positive feedback from concept testing

30% Improved information retrieval speed

Validated product-market fit and got budget approval for MVP scope

The Challenge:

Agencies managing public safety equipment operate on a wide spectrum of asset management systems, from manual paper-based workflows to advanced automated platforms. Despite these varied setups, consistent pain points emerge: inefficiency, fragmentation, and lack of real-time oversight. This diversity in workflows raises fundamental questions:

• How might we empower agencies to seamlessly transition from outdated, manual processes to efficient, automated solutions?

• For agencies already using established systems, what would motivate them to adopt new solution?

• What value could Axon bring that differentiates itself from existing tools and directly addresses the daily challenges faced by public safety officers and IT administrators?

Phase 1

Semi-structured user + stakeholder interviews: Allowing for consistent data collection and exploratory discussion

Requirements | Constraints

How they managed their equipment and assets, and what challenges they faced.

Phase 2

Person building: Understand primary and secondary personas: Armorers, Device Managers, IT Administrators, Quartermaster Staff to understand

Competitive Analysis: Evaluating market solutions and identifying opportunity gaps

Workflow mapping

Phase 3

Concept Testing: Validate early concepts and help product evaluate the value and identify product market fit.

Phase 4

Surveys: A quantitative survey helped validate some qualitative insights and broadened the scope of feedback beyond direct interviews.

Discovery Phase One & Two (3 Weeks)

In the discovery phase, our main objective was to immerse ourselves in the lives of potential users.

• Gain a better understanding of how agencies currently manage their assets and inventory. This involves examining their existing tools and methodologies, categorization of assets.

• Evaluate whether agencies would be interested in having a comprehensive view of all their assets consolidated within a single platform.

• Investigate the specific types of notifications and errors agencies frequently encounter and the 3rd party tools they use to fulfil their needs.

• Explore the roles and permissions in terms of viewing various kinds of information relevant to asset management.

Who

What

• Total of 9 in-depth semi-structured interviews with end-users (3) & stakeholders (6) with sales, CSMs, device managers and armorers.

• Competitive analysis of existing solutions

Questions for stakeholders across global markets

• Agency configuration and country policy

• Devices configuration

• Roles and responsibilities

• Market competition

• Rules and permissions at agency level

Questions for end users

• Current processes and pain points

• Roles and responsibilities

• Device management workflows

• Error handling and maintenance

• Reporting needs

As we were analyzing data from the qualitative interviews we identified pattern that emerged across several categories.

• Agency sizes

  • Small - mid sized agencies (1-200 officers): Often relied on sergeants/lieutenants managing devices part-time alongside other duties.

  • Large agencies (8000+ officers): Had dedicated armorers for specific device types.

• Differing Needs Between US and International Markets:

• Manual Processes Creating Overhead

• Inaccurate Check-In/Check-Out Process

• Device Tracking and Missing Equipment

1. Information Architecture: How could we group data to match users' mental models?

2. Workflow Organization: Could we structure information around equipment lifecycle stages?

3. Task Prioritization: How might we surface critical errors and maintenance needs?

We created interactive prototypes that were intentionally simple but realistic, focusing on 2-3 core workflows.
"We need to make this feel real enough that users can imagine it in their daily work, but focused enough that we get clear feedback on our core assumptions."

Concept Testing Approach

We selected 3 armory managers who hadn't participated in our initial research and gave us fresh perspectives while ensuring our participants deeply understood the domain.

We opted for think-aloud testing with the prototypes because it would reveal both usability issues and users' mental models of device management workflows.

• What's your ideal snapshot when you first came into work?

• How do you monitor assigned vs. returned devices?

• Walk me through how you handled device errors today.

A feature prioritization survey was conducted during the final phase of prototyping allowing the users to evaluate the importance of various features and express their willingness to invest in them. The results, visualized through dollar iconography, provided insights into which functionalities users valued most and helped refine the app’s feature set and pricing strategy.

Scale: -5 to +5 with frowning/smiley face on each side indicating their emotion on the numerical scale.

• Immediate data processing

• Pattern recognition using affinity mapping

  • "A clear correlation emerged between agency size and process sophistication. Small agencies relied heavily on manual processes, while larger agencies created complex workarounds using multiple systems."

• Thematic analysis - Across agency sizes and use cases.

  • Role-based access: Users strongly desired granular permission control. As one participant explained: "Training coordinators need to see less than system admins. Everyone needs to stay in their lane."

  • Mobile integration: A surprising insight was the desire for officer self-service through a mobile app. One armorer suggested: "If officers could report device issues directly from their phones, it would save us so much time tracking down problems."

  • Data refresh rates: Users wanted different refresh rates for different types of data - critical errors needed near-real-time updates, while inventory counts could be updated less frequently.

Cross validation - Triangulation of data

• Value testing results and prioritization tests: These structured exercises revealed precisely where agencies spent most of their time and mental energy and what they would like to invest in.

• Terminology alignment: Different agencies use different terms for similar concepts. We needed to align with their language or make our terms self-evident.

“This would take care of at least 50% of my concern as far as our technology is getting a good grouping of technology together.” - Bedford PD

Feature prioritization

• Real-time device status monitoring identified as highest priority

• Error alerting system as critical safety feature

• Basic inventory management as a foundation

Business strategy impact

• Clear validation of market need

• Willingness to pay for specific features

• Competitive differentiation opportunities

User experience impact

• Reduced cognitive load through consolidated dashboards

• Proactive error notification system

• Streamlined device management processes

After concept validation I strategically chose the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) to share with the PM as the next path forward as input into PRFAQ project funding. JTBD were

• Progress-Focused vs. Solution-Focused

• Solution-Agnostic

• Measurable Outcomes

JTBD focused on the core progress users want to make, rather than just feature requests. As Clayton Christensen notes in his Jobs Theory, people don't buy products; they "hire" them to help them make progress in specific circumstances.

This JTBD approach resonated well with product management for several reasons:

PRFAQ alignment

• Jobs directly mapped to user benefits

• Clear connection between user needs and business value

• Easy to justify development investment

MVP scoping

• Clear prioritization of the most important jobs

• Natural grouping of related capabilities

• Framework for measuring success

These resources gave product confident to start working towards highest-impact features first:

• Real-time device status monitoring

• Error alerting system

• Basic inventory management

Long-term strategy impact

• Platform evolution

• Market positioning

• Partnership opportunities

Key Success

• Vision sprint innovation: The project's structure as a vision sprint created space for methodological experimentation often constrained in hardware-focused projects.

• Greenfield opportunity: Working on a net-new software product, rather than iterating on existing hardware.

• Cross-functional collaboration: The project pushed me beyond my usual hardware team boundaries.

Areas for Growth

• Stakeholder engagement strategy: While the research execution was strong, I see opportunities to improve stakeholder management like earlier engagement with senior leadership and more frequent executive touchpoints.

  • A key learning was that robust research isn't enough - you need to actively build and maintain executive support throughout the process.

• Research methodology expansion: Although our remote interviews were effective, I identified several methods like dairy studies and longitudinal studies to track behavior patterns that could have deepened our insights.

• Cross-pillar collaboration: The project highlighted the importance of early alignment across organizational boundaries.