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Work info
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Role:
UX Designer, Researcher and Prototyper
Timeline:
Jan 2026 - Apr 2026
Scope:
UX Research, Interaction Design, Coded Prototyping, Usability Testing
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Context
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A Famous Murder Trial Collapsed on Evidence Handling
In 1994 the case against O.J. Simpson had strong physical evidence behind it, and it fell apart anyway. Investigators bagged separate items together, walked the scene before it was secured, and left blood samples undocumented. At trial, the defense barely touched the evidence. It went after the handling, and that was enough.
The same mistakes still happen. Officers record the most legally sensitive document in a case by hand, on paper, at the scene. Documentation errors have contributed to roughly 24% of US DNA exonerations.
Officers Trust Paper Because It Holds Up in Court
Officers weren't loyal to paper out of habit. Several said a digital record would be more reliable than the notes they take now. The hesitation was court: paper has held up under cross-examination for decades, and a new app hasn't.
So the bar was high. Officers would only switch if the digital record was as defensible as paper. We built SampleCSI with SampleServe to clear it, starting at the scene, where the record begins.
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Research
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What We Found: Paperwork, Broken Handoffs, Overload
We used a mix of methods to understand how evidence actually moves:
Secondary research on chain-of-custody law and current procedures
Interviews with officers across patrol, investigations, and evidence units
An artifact study of the paper forms departments use today
A competitive teardown of three platforms: Axon, Omnigo, and NICE
We clustered it all through affinity mapping in FigJam, and three patterns kept surfacing.
Piles of paperwork
Officers enter the same details over and over, from scene to notebook to station to management system. "Your notes are only as good as the person writing them," one told us. Miss a step, and the chain of custody gets "a little bit muddled."
Teams collaborate, but systems don't
A scene has several people on it and no shared record. "I go in and retype almost everything," one said. The quieter failure is a sheet of paper that "sits somewhere on a desk or in a folder" because someone forgot to hand it off.
Too much to think through, all at once
A live scene is full of competing demands. "The bigger the case, the more room for error." And the smallest slips are common: "It's surprising how often people forget to put the date on that label."
No Two Agencies Collect Evidence the Same Way
The artifact study made this clear early. There's no single way agencies document evidence: they use different forms, different terms, and weigh different details. Our first instinct was to standardize all of it into one clean flow. The more forms we read, the worse that felt. A standard flow would have been tidier for us, but it would have forced officers to abandon the way they already work.
So we made a tradeoff. The record had to stay court-ready, but the tool had to bend to how each agency already works, not force officers to change. That decision shaped everything we designed next.
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Design
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Creating Sample CSI
Sketches
The whole team ran a round of rapid ideation, sketching as many screen concepts as we could against a tight clock, then regrouped to keep what was worth building on.
We landed on a tabbed layout over a single linear flow, since evidence work isn't linear and officers need to move between steps freely.
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Testing
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Key Design Changes From Testing
We tested the prototype with five law enforcement professionals, 3 remote on desktop and 2 in person on tablet.
The flow mostly held up. The changes that mattered came straight from what officers said, and four of them shaped the final product.
-> One of our participants testing the prototype on an ipad
The Dashboard
"The cards can show the number of evidences involved in current cases." — P4
We added an evidence count to each case card and replaced vague statuses with plain ones: "Ongoing" and "Handed-off."
Evidence Collection Capture
“The note taker should be able to say other person collected the evidence” -P3
Collection is usually a two-person job, so we added a "Found By" field and a place to log field tests.
We renamed "Requested Exams" to "Lab Exams" and tied the options to the evidence type, so officers only saw what applied.
The form also prompts for context an officer might forget, as a suggestion they can take or ignore.
Evidence Linking
"Why am I linking it as a child? I'm not aware of that terminology." -P3
Officers didn't recognize "parent" and "child." We switched to Primary and Secondary, and let an officer link one primary item to several secondary ones in a single step.
Chain of Custody
"Is there a place where it shows where it was submitted? Like to the state lab." - P2
The log was buried under the name "Activity Log" and got skipped.
We renamed it Chain of Custody, made each entry tappable, and added context like where an item was sent.
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Using AI
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How We Used AI
In the product
Officers asked for a safety net. One wanted a system that could prompt questions like "how did you find it," something almost dummy-proof.
So as an officer fills out the form, an AI writing guide surfaces the questions a court will ask later: how the item was found, what surrounded it, whether it was moved.
It also suggests likely lab tests for the evidence type. The AI only suggests; the officer decides what goes in the record.
Building it
Rather than creating clickable screens on Figma, I led the prototyping, using Claude Code to turn our designs into a working, deployed prototype. The tabs kept their state, the form adapted to the evidence type, evidence linked and unlinked, and Face ID blocked submission until a record was complete.
I chose a coded prototype on purpose: so we could see whether the workflow held up when a real officer used it, not just whether the screens looked right. The version officers tested is the version that's live today.
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Learnings
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What I learned
The words matter as much as the design
We assumed the flow was the hard part and the labels were a detail. In testing, one unfamiliar word was enough to make officers distrust a feature, so we learned to use the language people already know instead of the terms that made sense to us.
Build the real thing when you can
I expected coding the prototype to be the easy part after the design. It taught me the most, because a working build breaks in ways a Figma file never will, and finding those breaks early during testing made the final design stronger.
Great teammates make it easier
They put in the work, kept us organized when the timeline got tight, and made a heavy project genuinely fun. That's rarer in a group project than it should be.
