Police apps updated
Police Officer Status Update application evolution
Part of our learning since Surrey Police trialled the worlds first police officer twitter status update application last year has been how to make the work that officers do easily visible to the community. In our first release app, we used a twitter convention for identifying people among a group using the same twitter account using the caret ^ symbol, followed by their initials - so ^MV means person with the initials MV. We also used hashtags - words preceded by the # symbol to denote the person's identification number.
Feedback from twitter users and users of our public application for Surrey Police was that this was hard to decipher.
So now that we are in the midst of roll out to all of Surreys neighbourhood officers we wanted to make improvements and so we have researched every data item we use and looked at how to make them more readable while retaining the single or double tap to update ease of use that has made our app such a hit with officers and staff.
Here's an example using the last of the old and the first of the new style tweets from RunnymedeBeat.
| Original App Tweet | New App Tweet |
|---|---|
https://twitter.com/RunnymedeBeat/statuses/157461145047924737 |
https://twitter.com/RunnymedeBeat/statuses/157749842335113217 |
This very visible change conveys understanding more easily to the person reading, who now doesn't have to decode gobbledegook hashtags or codified information.
