An offline ready cross-platform mobile app for CAT-UXO to deliver IED Awareness Training in remote locations..

The Challenge

CAT-UXO approached us with an outdated app that no longer worked on the app store and wasn’t available on Android devices. They were at a point where they needed to update the design and build of the app in order to continue raising awareness around Improvised Explosive Device (IEDs).

This app is sponsored by Atom Training and within the redesign and build it was important that Atom had a stronger presence within the app. After Richard at CAT-UXO talked us through his process of adding training courses and IED data into his database, we quickly realised that we needed to improve his workflow and data entry process.

A few of the main goals for the app were to increase the number of users that were contributing data, create connections between IED types and IED incidents, and create a newsfeed for users to stay up to date.

The Process & Solution

It was important for us to understand the features and functionalities of the current app and so a full analysis was carried out. We wanted to break the design and build down into reusable templates, which consisted of reusable components. The app needed to be cross-platform and was going to be developed on the Ionic framework. In order to make full use of the framework, we looked into the existing component styles to see how they could fit in with the new templates.

A style guide was put together that contained all of the basic styles used across the app. Doing this allows for consistency and gives the development team a base set of styles to work from. You can see an insight into our style guide below.

The main purpose of CAT-UXO is to deliver awareness training to users. There are currently 3 different awareness training courses on offer to users:

• How IEDs function
• How to avoid IEDs
• How to respond to IEDs

For these training courses, we’ve created a reusable template that CAT-UXO can use to create his course content. We’ve also introduced a progress bar on the training overview and training content pages. Before users didn’t know how far along they were in a course so introducing this progress bar has solved that problem.

A new feature that we designed for this app was the newsfeed. The newsfeed is a place for users to come where they can stay up to date on the latest global news about IEDs and incidents. This content is primarily created by CAT-UXO, however, it is possible for users to submit their own articles to the app via an approval process. The user journey for this process has been kept really simple in hope that it encourages users to contribute news within the app.

Another huge part of the new CAT-UXO app was creating data relationships between IED types, IED incidents and Terrorist Groups. Previously these data sets have been kept separate. Whilst you can still view the data this way we’ve also created Related Types, Related Incidents and Related Terrorist Groups blocks on these pages.

We’ve also been working on another app for CAT-UXO which uses the templates created for the IEDs app but for Landmine data instead. They’re both available on the App Store so go and check them out!