Skydio - 2024
Drone as First Responder
Overview
The Drone as First Responder program at Skydio ensures you’re ready to get drones on scene fast, respond to incidents with total situational awareness, and resolve them with the best possible outcomes.
I helped design the DFR program that public safety agencies use to remotely dispatch, operate, and monitor drones to respond to incidents and keep communities safer.
Goals
Themes: Speed, Reliability, and Ease
The most important factor that first responders need is to get visibility to emergency incidents as quickly as possible. Not only do they need the drone there quickly, they also need to trust that the system is accurate and reliable in all environmental conditions.
Research and Workshops
This was an extremely complicated workflow – one full of nuance and edge cases. We had to deeply understand what the full experience was.
As a design team, we sat down and plotted the entire workflow down onto FigJam. We held product jam sessions cross-functionally with members in engineering, product management, regulatory, support, and flight to make sure we weren’t missing anything.
Ultimately, this project looked like the UX made the most sense to be broken out into pre-flight, in-flight, and post-flight.
We generated a whole bunch of ideas
Through many discussions with customers and cross-functional partners, we were able to distill it down to four distinct screens
Challenges & Considerations
One of the key challenges in this project was that the design preceded the technology. It was difficult to fully design out how the UI and UX would work without knowing:
how external APIs would interact within our system
how the system would determine the “best suited” drone to send
how viewing and controlling multiple drones at one time would work
The exciting part was that Skydio are the pioneers in this space and the design team was defining the vision of DFR 🎉
Design
Press
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I believe DFR changes everything ... It allows us to make more informed decisions and do more with less... just based off having something that can be on scene before we are. It's a game changer.
Gabriel Grapevine, EMS Officer Tulsa Fire Department
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DFR is definitely the next big thing. I think technology is playing an extremely pivotal role in HazMat response. At the end of the day, I'm trying to do everything I can to make it safer for our guys and the people we're working for.
Rich Gatanis, Firefighter/HazMat Technician Southern Manatee Fire Rescue
