Law enforcement officers need training materials
Centralizing lessons helped agencies customize content.
Introduction
Police Legal Sciences has provided training for law enforcement for 25 years. They began with legal update training in only a few states and have since expanded their offerings and reach across North America.
The problem
With their growth, managing and distributing content became increasingly challenging. They needed a more scalable solution to make management easier while also giving agencies more options, like adjusting content to fit their needs.
Content mapping
I needed to understand the hierarchy of content organization, as it directly impacted how information is presented to different users. To ensure it was accurate, I worked with their team in FigJam to map out the relationships between key concepts. This visual map highlights the complexity of the system, from agencies to user groups, individual users, courses, and lessons.
Finding the right amount of complexity
This system serves users with different levels of responsibility:
- Global Admins – Manage the entire system.
- Agency Admins – Oversee their own users.
- Individuals – Simply consume content.
As responsibilities decrease, the interface adjusts, providing robust controls for admins while remaining simple and intuitive for end users.
Example of necessary complexity
In this example, a lesson is being created at a global level and these details will appear the same for everyone on the platform.
That same lesson needs to be customized for an individual agency, allowing changes to due dates, assigned user groups, and other details.
To visually distinguish an instance we introduced this modal pattern to represent an instance of content.
From the agency admin's perspective, the complexity is reduced since they only manage a single version of the lesson.
Other resources
I often think about this talk from Config a few years ago about balancing simplicity and business expertise.