The Fire Department of New York needed to update their computerized fire dispatch system, STARFIRE. The original system had been built using an Assembly processing language that only one man in the FDNY knew how to program (and that man was looking to retire). Additionally, the limitations of the screen display meant that the system could not grow to accommodate the needs of a modern-day city.

FDNY dispatchers are the fastest in the world — able to get a fire truck anywhere in the five boroughs in less than 5 minutes. Nevertheless, the original system was unintuitive and required months of training. The FDNY had already attempted to bring in outside consultants to help update their system on three occasions, but were frustrated because the consultants had attempted to shoehorn the FDNY process into pre-built systems. It was our job to create an interface that preserved their current workflows while making incremental, but impactful, improvements.

Becoming Experts

Our biggest hurdle came not only in learning the current dispatch system, but also gaining the trust of the FDNY dispatchers. Since very little had been documented on the system, we spent a series of 8 six-hour workshops going through every screen and field to document and understand its purpose. The process of the workshops were two-fold: gain expertise through research and building relationships with the people who would ultimately be using this new system.

Building Trust Through Prototyping

Using Axure, I made conditionally programmed prototypes that hooked up to a keyboard modeled after the specialized FDNY dispatch keyboards to demonstrate the ways that we could recreate the screens using the same number of keystrokes as the current system.

Final UI

The overall design is streamlined, relying heavily on clean typography and limited — but symbolically important — color systems. The visual design for the new system uses a dark UI so as not to strain the dispatchers’ eyes in the darkened rooms where they work.