Reportero de la Gestión Gubernamental · Government of the D.R. · 6 months

A case, not a form

A citizen report with a state, a priority, an institution on the hook and a conversation thread that stays alive until it closes with proof. I designed the whole app. The part that decided it was the twenty days spent in police stations, before drawing anything.

Role: Product designer · product vision · designed the entire app · UX research
Timeline: 6 months, end to end
Built with: 1 Xamarin dev, 2 back-end engineers, 1 data scientist, product owners and stakeholders
Users: Citizens, officers, institutions, administrators

Reportero: the real dashboard on a laptop and the citizen case on a phone — The real dashboard: institutions, open cases, resolution rate. Not a mockup.

Twenty days before the first screen

We were told who the users were. Then we went and met them: 20+ days across the country, in the stations where the app would actually be opened. The officers were nothing like the description. The average one was over forty, and most of them could use a phone perfectly well — which is not what we had been told either.

That is the whole argument for going. A brief describes the user the institution imagines. Twenty days describe the one who will open it on a Tuesday.

Fran Bencosme running a testing session with police officers in a station meeting room — One of the field sessions. 200+ officers tested the app; 400+ reports were created during testing.

A report that has to come back

Most public reporting tools are a form with a send button, and the citizen never hears again. The design decision here was that a report is a case with a life: a state, a priority, a named institution that owns it, and a thread that only closes when the institution posts evidence that the thing was done.

The flow of a case: the reporter creates it, the institution receives it, resolves it, notifies with evidence and the case closes — How it works, as it was designed. The loop closes with proof or it does not close.

Six user types, one app

Citizen, officer, officers by zone or jurisdiction, institution, admin, super admin. Each one needs a different thing from the same object, and a wrong split here costs a rebuild. So it was mapped before it was drawn: the ticketing system, the citizen app and the admin app on one board, with dates.

Reportero wireframes: login, home and create report — Wireframes: login, home, create report. Short steps, because the useful information comes later.

What came out of testing

200+ officers tested it and 400+ reports were created during testing. The lesson I keep from it is not about the app: it is that people use their phones nothing like the way an org chart assumes, and simplicity opens a door that training never does.

Four real screens of the Reportero app — The alpha, in the officers' hands.

A report that arrives with nowhere to land is not a service. It is a message.