GRIFFEYE AT WORK
“A good user experience allows investigators to work smarter, minimize frustration and stay focused longer.”
As any seasoned UX designer will tell you, there is a lot more to UX than appearances. Especially when it comes to a platform like Griffeye Analyze, where UX plays a pivotal role in enabling investigators to work as efficiently as possible while protecting their mental health. This is something that Frans Kullgren can attest to after working at Griffeye for almost two years as a User Experience Designer.
Here, we delve further into the topic of UX design with Frans. He discusses some of the essential ways that design solutions are applied to improve the user experience on Griffeye Analyze, the importance of maintaining a close collaboration with investigators, and one simple design update that made a game-changing impact.
What is your role at Griffeye?
I work as a User Experience Designer, which essentially means I work with creating the best possible overall product experience for our users.
We understand that there is more to the user experience than the visual look. Can you tell us about some other design aspects of the Analyze platform?
Just as look and feel is one aspect of UX, another important one is interaction design. We try to work closely with our users to understand how they interact with our system and what kinds of contexts and limitations they operate under. Ultimately, in this aspect, our goal is to create interactions that are easy to understand, predict and perform. Interaction design is very important when it comes to a tool like Griffeye Analyze, where the purpose is to facilitate, ease and streamline investigators’ demanding work.
How does the UX work you do at Griffeye impact our users’ daily work?
Us providing a good user experience allows investigators to work smarter, minimize frustration and stay focused longer. The end result is more cases being solved and, ultimately, more suspects identified and victims rescued.
Tell us more about the relationship between the UX team and our users at Griffeye.
It’s very important for us to have a close relationship with our users since we at Griffeye can never see the illegal material our users analyze in their investigations, which adds some challenges when working from a UX perspective. It’s always good to maintain close contact with your users but these kinds of limitations really make it necessary. Lucky for us, the level of engagement and commitment from our users is truly outstanding and makes our work a lot easier. The feeling is more that we’re in this together, and it helps ensure that we develop the best possible product and don’t spend time developing the wrong things.
Can you give us an example of a design update that had a positive impact on our users?
The first thing that comes to mind is a function we call “Pixelate.” For us, it was quite a small update but it has had a big impact on the mental health of our users. The function automatically pixelates all the illegal images visible on the screen. It is a very effective way of minimizing our users’ exposure to this type of traumatizing material which they have to deal with every day.
GRIFFEYE AT WORK is a series of interviews with employees exploring topics related to life at work, how we develop our products—and who the people are behind them.
