Case Study

Helping firefighters and nurses focus on saving lives

Reducing task completion time by over 28%, and increasing feature adoption by up to 150%.

Efficiency

-28.58%

Reduced task completion speed

User satisfaction

4.3/5

Increased from 3.4 to 4.3

Feature adoption

68%

Reminders closure rate increased by 68%

Feature adoption

153%

Issues closure rate increased by 153%

01 Context

Firefighters and nurses conduct checks, at the start of every shift.

They check each equipment, 1 by 1, to ensure it's working. They use this product called Armoury, to fill in that checklist.

All to ensure they can save you and your loved ones' lives, during emergencies.

Firefighters checking equipment in the firetruck
Nurses ensuring medical equipment are sterile and functional
Firefighter using Armoury to fill in checklists

02 Diagnosing the root cause behind a low satisfaction score

Upon joining the product, Armoury's satisfaction score was low, and task time was high. Issues and Reminders features were not being used.

I helped my Product Manager to understand why.

Q: How satisfied are you with the overall platform experience? 3.4 out of 5

I scoured through our survey — tagged each piece of written feedback to create thematic categories.

Feedback themes waffle chart showing categories and counts

03 Prioritising and wearing the PM hat: Gathering data on impact, writing out our bets…

Being in a small start-up team, meant that a designer takes on a Product Manager's tasks sometimes.

Then, I sorted these themes into backlog tasks.

I collated the following to create P1, P2 and P3 tasks:

  1. Design Objective
  2. Data & Impact Sizing
  3. The Bet / Metric we want to move
Breaking down the KRs into design tasks — Data and Impact sizing
Breaking down the KRs into design tasks — Bet and Priority

04 Selecting methodology based on product maturity

I validated the designs two-fold, with both Quantitative and Qualitative research:

  1. Target of n=100 Remote Usability Tests (Quant) +
  2. Trials & 1:1 UTs (Qual)
Moving from 0 to 1 stage to 1 to 10 stage, supporting multiple public hospitals on top of the entire SCDF

There were also multiple design objectives to be met. To ensure we validate each one of these robustly, I split our enhancements into 2 separate tests.

Each test has its own set of variables.

Split into two separate but concurrent tests — Test 1 testing Variable 1, Test 2 testing Variable 2

Test 1

05 How might we help frontliners zoom in on items with issues quickly, and create better information scannability,

so that they can complete their checks as quickly as possible?

User Need 1

Firefighters and nurses need to focus only on the equipments with issues, rather than look through all the equipment 1 by 1.

"As we are quite familiar with the equipment, can fasten the checking time?"
Firefighter
"The "issue" part of the checking can be more straight forward."
Firefighter

User Need 2

Their main ask is to "fasten the checking time", as they want to complete their checks quickly and go back to saving lives.

"Simplify it and only show the things that have issues"
Emergency Medical Technician

Pain points

Pain point 1: Low visibility of Issues — the issues should appear upfront in the first layer of information
Pain point 2: High friction — it takes up to 3 clicks to view the details of an Issue
Pain point 3: Lack of informational hierarchy creates more cognitive load, and buttons are too big causing misclicks

Test 2

06 How might we make it easier to navigate and stay oriented in the checklist,

so they can easily locate items without feeling lost or fatigued?

User Need 1

Being busy people, frontliners want to navigate and find sections and items quickly.

"(Troublesome) having to go back and forth between pages"
Section Commander
Pain point: Too many unnecessary clicks to navigate between pages

Solutions

07 We achieved a 73%↓ reduction in task time, with only 6.8 seconds to complete the task with the enhanced designs.

Cleaner hotspots — Original designs vs Enhanced designs heatmap comparison
Reduced from 3 clicks to no clicks — surfaced key information on the upmost level
"Ability to set reminders and report issues more easily."
EMT
"As a logs rota, this is very useful."
Firefighter

Our satisfaction score increased to 4.3/5 during usability tests and pilots, and stayed at a stable 4/5 after the initial trials and pilots.

Q: How satisfied are you with the overall platform experience? 4.3 out of 5
User quotes: Better than old Armoury, Good easy to refer to, It has an overview of all critical info
Makes moving around the different lockers/cabins faster and more efficient

07 Bringing Product and Engineering, along the journey

Closely collaborating with my engineers and PMs, was crucial to the success of this piece of work. Being able to create spaces where other functions felt comfortable to pitch in ideas, and work towards our goal together.

Two people reviewing ideas on the wall
Slide from ideation workshop
My ideas worksheets from ideation session