Karsten Rowe on Designing for Law Enforcement

Alex Smith: Design Leader Insights is brought to you by Fuego UX. Fuego UX is a leading UX research, strategy, and design consultancy. Hey, Karsten. Thanks so much for joining the show today.

Karsten Rowe: Hello, Alex. Nice to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Alex Smith: Yeah, of course. And just to get started, can you tell us a little bit about your background and journey in UX? 

Karsten Rowe: Yeah, I'll keep it brief. From England, went to graphic design school in Northern England. After graduating, went to London for about 10 years. It was when the internet was really starting to blow up. So started in like brand and marketing and print, then moved into kind of web and product design. Got an opportunity to go out to San Francisco. Thought that would be a good idea. That was kind of the dream as a kid, spent a couple of years there. And, and now I'm in Seattle working at Axon as Director of Product Design. 

Alex Smith: Cool. I want to hear about Axon. Can you tell us what that is and what, what you all do just for those that might not know?

Karsten Rowe: Yeah, sure. So if you work in public safety, you know who Axon are. If you don't work in public safety, you don't know who Axanar are. But basically we do a lot of things for law enforcement. We are branching out into different industries and, and things like that. But, we started about 30 years ago with the Taser. Our CEO, Rick Smith, had a dream to kind of well, he actually experienced a really bad incident where some of his friends were shot. And he was like, hey, there's gotta be a better way. We're firing, like, these metal things, pellets at each other and those kind of things. So the taser was the first big product. It wasn't successful for the first 20 years, but over the last decade, we've done really well. Next big product was the body camera. Kind of making the cop and the public a bit more accountable for their own actions, a bit more transparency when kind of going to court. And then from there we've just kind of built out this huge ecosystem of hardware and software from in-car experiences to dispatch software, to interview room, to a bunch of other things that we do. And we're kind of like, I don't know if it sounds too hue or we're blowing our own trumpet, but we're kind of the gold standard in public safety. Doing things for firefighters, cops, in call centers for, for medical teams, all those kind of things. So like real time crime center where you've kind of got all the big screens and big videos and live streaming and, and all that kind of jazz. So it's a very interesting space. If you'd asked me four or five years ago, when I'd be working in public safety, I would have said no, but now I'm here it feels very meaningful and it's exciting. It's challenging, but I think as a designer, that's kind of what you're after. You do want the challenge and you do want to feel like you're building and making something and hopefully, hopefully moving their world or the community into a better place rather than in a worse place.

Alex Smith: We, we don't get to talk to a lot of leaders that are dealing with, you know, going a hundred miles per hour in a pursuit or something like that. Like, how do you, how do you become that user or think about the user and like the extremes that that user is going to be in, that mindset that they're going to be in when designing for these products?

Karsten Rowe: Yeah. A couple of things, like we have this kind of motto, it's like every second counts, right? And that is true in so many situations, but like, and, but as you said, like a cop isn't driving a hundred miles per hour to every event, right? So you can't just design for those like really critical moments. You have to design for them, but you can't just kind of make a blanket statement that somebody is like holding a gun to somebody's head at all times. 

Alex Smith: All right. 

Karsten Rowe: Yeah. Thanks. But I think, you know, what we have to do, we have to like, in a cop car, like, part of the job is you do a lot of ride alongs, right, and you see a lot of the things out in the field, which is exciting, but also scary, but that really makes you understand what their kind of world is. And they have such a, like, So many kind of inputs, there's all these beeping from different softwares, there's the radio, there's the body camera, there's the phone, there's the MDT, which is the computer mounted in the car. They're probably wearing a wearable as well, right, so there's all these kind of different inputs. So we call it, like, there's all this data, right, and we try and, like, make it kind of intelligent, you don't want to distract the user, like, so, I'm a cop, I arrive on the scene, like, there's a witness, there's a suspect, there's a reporting party, I need my hands and ears and eyes to be there on the scene. I can't be looking down on a phone, I can't be distracted by this beeping thing in my pocket. So you really need to design for that environment and, and those situations. And, you know, you need to change the experience. If I'm on lunch, right, and I'm, I'm chillin out, and I'm not on a P Zero event, driving really fast. The technology should behave differently, compared to like, I've arrived on this scene, and like, I'm first on scene, and it's a P Zero downtown, high crime area. Shots fired like at that point the technology needs to kind of get out the way. Yeah, so you can't, you can't, you never want to design something that's too distracting at a crucial moment is my point.

‍Alex Smith: It sounds like you know a ton about these years. How do you learn that? Like do you? How do you become a cop or do you become a cop? 

Karsten Rowe: I've got no background in policing or law enforcement. We do hire a lot of like ex-LE and stuff on the team as like subject matter experts, which is great. And then we have like design partners as we're kind of developing projects, which is great. We have lots of access to customers. I've been all over the country in call centers in really kind of crime ridden areas and seen a lot of stuff and done a lot of ride alongs and I think, like, when you're designing for a consumer product, you can put your little, oh, I can imagine using this banking app because I use banking apps. 

‍Alex Smith: Right, right, right, right. 

Karsten Rowe: You can't imagine using some of the products that they use because you're not a cop. So I think you know, we have this value called be obsessed and it's about like being in the customer's shoes and spending as much time out in the field. Because some of the conventions and some of the patterns you see in other products just wouldn't work in our world. Law enforcement generally are slow to adopt new things. So, you can't push out this update to software that changes this experience that slows that user down when they're trying to take a 911 call and dispatching an ambulance to somebody who's having a heart attack. You can't, you can't abruptly change that for somebody in the middle of a shift. You have to kind of roll out things intentionally slowly. And be aware of, like, kind of what's happening out in the field, right? And you need to have a higher bar for the standard and knowing it's right. There's less experiments, right? Yeah, there's a lot less experiment. 

Alex Smith:  Yeah. What about, like, AI in that, in that industry or public health?

Karsten Rowe: Yeah, we just released this new product that we're really proud of. It's called Draft One. So at the end of every event, a cop has to write a report of what's happened in that event. So we're using AI to write the report based on what's recorded on the body camera. And they need to own the report. So they need to make edits and clean it up a little bit, but it's basically like saving them 80 percent of their time so they can spend more time patrolling, more time building relationships with the community, and more time doing the job that they thought they were signing up for. 

Alex Smith: Karsten, let's switch gears here though what advice do you have for new designers entering the field today?

Karsten Rowe: Just do a lot of it. I know that, like, I, like, I think I got, I got somewhat good at design because when in my twenties, I just did a lot of work and I like, I took on every project, worked for a bunch of different agencies. I think like, I'm, that's my style of learning, learn by doing, right? Learn by making mistakes, building your own apps, building your own products, like whatever you need to do to kind of like, you could do a lot of reading and watching YouTube. Great, go and do that, right? But I actually find the best way to get good at something is actually doing it in real life under pressure for money so that would be my advice. Number two is like portfolio is never gonna be perfect. Ship the thing. Know that it's live. Know that a recruiter is looking or a hiring manager is looking at it. That'll incentivize you to make it better. Don't hold it back for a year, make it perfect, and then ship it, right? I always talk about the probability game, so the, the, the job market right now is really difficult. And when I started to do a bit more mentoring on his ADP list, I've got a couple of things this week and I always ask them, they're always, oh, I really want to get into the industry or like, I'm in between jobs. I'm trying to land this next job or I'm trying to get this promotion. And I asked him, well, how many applications have you made this week? And I'll say like, one. And I'm like, well, it's a numbers game. It's a probability thing. If you apply for one job, it's going to take you two years to get a job. So like use interviewing and applying for jobs as practice. Every hiring manager screen, every recruiter screen, every interview you get, it's a way of kind of refining your pitch. You as a designer, you have to sell yourself, you have to sell your work, you gotta get really comfortable. And you gotta be confident, not overly confident, but you cannot be shy in being like, oh, please give me a job. You gotta kinda come to the table and like, say that you're looking for my skill set and I think I can do that job that you need to fill and so you like understand that probability is a thing and if you apply for one job a week, you're not gonna get very far. So like even if it isn't a perfect job, it might be a perfect job, it just doesn't look like it from the job post. 

Alex Smith: Yeah, or the interview process like you don't know until you get in there. And I think that last point, so true and rarely talked about, is that you kind of got to sell yourself as a designer and that doesn't stop after the interview process. There's going to be people questioning the value of UX for your entire career, right, because they don't understand it. And that's an education thing. It's a selling thing. It's, it's all of that. So yeah, Karsten, thank you so much for, for that advice and for the chat today. I really enjoyed it. Where can people go to find more about you?

Karsten Rowe: I think as I said, like I got a kind of unique name, so Karsten Rowe, if you Google it, I'll come up, but yeah, I've got a little website, but LinkedIn is the best way to connect for like jobs and mentoring and other kinds of things if you want to connect that way. Instagram is where you'll see loads of photos of me doing nice things, hopefully. I think we work hard to kind of play hard if that makes sense. And then SoundCloud, make some music. That's kind of like another one of my hobbies. Music and golf is what I do when I'm not designing stuff. But yeah, thanks again, Alex. Good to kind of have a chat. Hopefully we can do it again in the future.