UK Fire and Rescue Services

National Operational Guidance

Background

Over fifty fire and rescue services provide emergency cover across the U.K. The NOG team are made of fire and rescue staff based at the London Fire Brigade HQ seconded from different backgrounds offering a wide range of expertise.

This project was part of a six-year programme to replace over 8,000 paper-based documents with an online only framework that delivers policy and tactical guidance that is compatible with other emergency services and tailorable to local needs, overcoming the historic issues of duplication and dissemination. The website simplifies how fire and rescue services can find, access and act on the latest operational guidance whilst maintaining a full audit of how guidance has changed from now into the future.

  • Key elements of the updated and newly engineered platform for online guidance are:
  • A dramatically improved user experience for consumers of the guidance products
  • Dynamic and user-friendly cross referencing between related areas of the guidance products
  • Efficient editing for content used in multiple places across the site
  • Bookmarking and email alert functionality to notify registered users of updates to content
  • Version history taking into account a complex content hierarchy structure
  • Custom-built comparison between chronological revisions of content
  • User feedback and social sharing mechanisms

Phase 2 enabled the UK’s 50 fire and rescue services to create local and tailored versions of the central guidance platform and phase 3 plans to enable offline mobile access to the national and local content via an incident focussed customisable interface.

My role

  • Working closely with the NOG team to structure the vast amount of content into a clear, flexible and usable information architecture
  • Developing a detailed interactive prototype demonstrating navigation, integration between guidance, training and learning, and interactive elements
  • Developing additional interactive prototypes to plan guidance tools for learning, gap analysis and version history
  • Working closely with the development team to communicate ideas and functionality
  • User interface design
  • Logo and icon design

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