Karen Roberts
Improving trust in reports, without sacrificing accuracy
PSAP employees rely on reports to monitor performance, call activity, and potential risks. However, existing reports were dense and outdated in design, making it difficult to quickly extract meaningful insights in high-pressure environments.
Project overview
This project focused on improving how PSAP reporting outputs are structured and delivered, making it easier to surface key information and support fast, confident interpretation in high-stakes operational environments, with a forward-looking focus on predictive insights and AI-powered assistance for decoding complex data.
The problem
Small typography, dense layouts, and a lack of alignment with the updated product branding made the reports feel disconnected from the modern system experience.
As a result, supervisors often had to reformat or validate reports before using them in high-stakes or external settings.
Key issues included:
Poor Readability
Report outputs were dense and visually outdated, with small typography and low hierarchy, making them difficult to scan and interpret quickly.
Low Trust
Outdated formatting and presentation reduced confidence in reports, especially when used in external or legal contexts.
Poor Presentation
Report lacked the flexibility to create polished, executive-ready visuals. Customization was limited mainly to basic styling such as font size and color, restricting their effectiveness for leadership and stakeholder review.
Misalignment with Modern Reporting Expectations
Current outputs didn’t align with modern expectations for data consumption. There is a growing demand for smarter reporting with predictive and AI-assisted insights.
How might we evolve PSAP reporting outputs to meet modern expectations for clarity, usability, and more intelligent data presentation?
Understanding our users
After speaking with users, research revealed that challenges weren’t just in how reports looked, but in how they were discovered, prepared, and used across real-world workflows.
Key findings included:
Reports are treated as “official records,” not just outputs
Reports are often used as authoritative documentation in operational reviews, audits, and external sharing.
This shifts expectations from “usable data” to credible, presentation-ready artifacts.
Trust is shaped by presentation, not just accuracy
Outdated layouts, rigid headers, and oversized title sections make reports feel unpolished and disconnected from modern expectations.
In contexts like audits or external sharing, this reduces perceived professionalism and trust, regardless of data accuracy.
Outputs are rarely “ready to use”
Reports often require manual work before they can be used. Users export data into Excel to reformat layouts, create custom graphs, and rely on external tools to better interpret the data.
Simplicity should be the default, not complexity
Users prefer simple, ready-to-use outputs for everyday use, with the ability to customize only when needed.
This highlights the importance of progressive disclosure, keeping reports easy to use by default, while allowing deeper control when necessary.
The Solution
The reporting outputs were redesigned to improve readability, trust, and usability, while supporting real-world use cases such as external sharing, audits, and operational review.
Beyond improving the core experience, the design also pushes toward modern expectations for reporting by introducing AI-powered insights and predictive guidance to help users interpret complex data more efficiently
Designed to support real-world use
Find it fast
Key information is surfaced through clear callouts, structured layouts, and descriptive labels, helping users quickly locate what matters without scanning entire reports.
Understand It instantly
Contextual help, anomaly highlights, and AI-powered Q&A help users quickly interpret complex data without relying on external tools.
Present professionally
Reports were redesigned with modern layouts, improved hierarchy, and cleaner visuals to support confident sharing in meetings, audits, and external contexts.
Scale with user needs
The experience is simple by default, with deeper insights available through AI and advanced views, allowing users to engage at their own level.
Reflection
This work shifted my perspective from treating reporting as a data presentation challenge to a usability and cognition challenge. A key focus was balancing simplicity for quick interpretation with the flexibility needed for more advanced users, especially in how reporting outputs are consumed and acted on.
This solution also leveraged our existing Power BI reporting capabilities, aligning the experience with our longer-term direction of consolidating reporting outputs within Power BI on the backend. This helped ensure the work wasn’t just solving immediate usability challenges, but also supporting a more scalable reporting architecture.
The solution is currently under stakeholder review and will be prioritized based on the availability and bandwidth of both the development and Power BI teams, reflecting the cross-functional nature of implementing reporting improvements.
