Police Legal Sciences Case Study
Centralizing lessons helped agencies customize content.
Introduction
Police Legal Sciences has provided training for law enforcement for more than 25 years. What began as legal update training in just a few states has grown into a broad set of offerings that now reach agencies across North America.
The Problem
As the organization grew, managing and distributing content became increasingly complex. They needed a scalable solution that streamlined administration while giving agencies greater flexibility—including the ability to customize training content to fit their specific needs.
Content mapping
Understanding the hierarchy of content organization was critical, as it directly shaped how information is delivered to different users. To capture this accurately, I collaborated with the team in FigJam to map the relationships between key concepts. The resulting map highlighted the system’s complexity—from agencies to user groups, individual users, courses, and lessons.
Balancing Complexity
This system serves users with different levels of responsibility:
- Global Admins – Manage the entire system.
- Agency Admins – Oversee their own agency’s users.
- Individuals – Consume training content.
As responsibilities decrease, the interface simplifies accordingly—offering robust tools for administrators while remaining intuitive and straightforward for end users.
Example of Necessary Complexity
When a lesson is created at the global level, its details remain consistent across the entire platform.
Agencies often need to customize these lessons with specific due dates, assigned user groups, or other details.
To distinguish these customized instances, we introduced a modal pattern that visually represents when content is adapted for a particular agency.
From the agency admin’s perspective, the view is simplified, since they manage only their agency’s version of the lesson.
Other Resources
I often return to a Config talk from a few years ago on balancing simplicity with business expertise—it continues to influence how I approach design challenges like this.