A versatile full-stack platform that combines facial/image recognition, natural language processing, and geospatial mapping to identify, track, and analyze entities.

Role: UX designer 

Time: August - September 2019 

Locate human trafficking victims by utilizing Oracle technologies in a versatile full-stack platform that combines facial/image recognition, natural language processing, and geospatial mapping to identify, track, and analyze entities.

Tying Technologies Together

The engineering team in the Oracle Innovation Hub developed the Snowglobe project components by combining other Oracle products and services together, to deliver powerful features to be utilized in locating trafficking victims. The components were developed independently, and the engineers wanted to design a platform that combines the components together with an easy-to-use interface.

We started by conducting a team meeting to discuss the project problem, project goals, and identify any constraints and risks.

Project goals:

• Win the hackathon competition to receive funds for the project.

• Develop a unified platform hosted on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

• Utilize oracle products and services to power the Snowglobe platform.

• Expand the use of Snowglobe to private investigators in the U.S and other countries.

Risks & Constraints:

• Lack of user and competitive research.

• We had 3 weeks to develop a design before joining a hackathon competition.

• Lack of funds to perform research.

Understanding the user 

Due to time constraints, we were not able to perform user research prior to entering the hackathon competition. We decided to best guess the users’ goals and validate them through usability testing.

• Users will need to be able to upload data into the database.

• Track victim’s recent social media activity.

• Track victim’s location where they were seen last.

• Generate analytics reports.

Prioritization

To help speed the development process, I conducted a feature prioritization exercise to help determine the time and resources required to develop the platform front-end. By narrowing down the features of the platform, the team will be able to speed the development process by focusing on the goals we set about the users.

Features prioritization insights

• Search feature: Ability to search cases and pull victims information  

• Visualization maps and graphs: Visualize data sets and find trend patterns, machine learning and connect to various data sources.

• Video Feed: Camera inputs allows us to track video footage from different cameras in different locations.

• Social media feed: Track victims using social media, scraping specific tweets containing keywords from a user’s twitter feed. It also attempts to fetch any tweet metadata like timestamp, location, mentioned users.

Usability Testing

After the feature prioritization process, I sketched wireframes to illustrate UI mockup and build a prototype to conduct usability to ensure the set user’s goal will be achieved.

I conducted two rounds of testing with four participants each round.

• Task 1: Generate an analytics report with the Oracle Analytics Cloud platform plugin.

• Task 2: Locate victims social media footprint and download the data.

Test outcomes

• Users had difficulty navigating between different pages to browse all the features.

• Users were able to easily find victims, but were not able to understand the latitude/longitude numbers. (ex: 44.1247 N, 73.8693 W).

• Loading time also was a challenge that impacted the performance of the features.

After usability test

• We combined the multiple pages into a single page application with multiple tabs and sub tabs.

• We added location as city, state with the latitude/longitude numbers as a supplement. 

• We enhanced the connections to the database and the oracle analytics cloud visualization dashboards by implementing a python script to only show the visualizations requested by the user.