At Priority Dispatch®, we are always seeking out new and better ways to support our Emergency Dispatchers and those in the field. The Frontline Forum seeks to take those efforts to a new level by directly collaborating with users on the front lines of public safety. The forum gives our teams working on the next generation of Priority Dispatch software products an opportunity to introduce designs and discuss conceptual improvements with those who are using our products every day.
The forum is not just limited to Emergency Dispatchers—we seek out a wide array of voices in public safety, including software users, supervisors, and administrators. If you can see opportunities for ANY of our software to better support you or your team’s needs, we want to include your voice in our development process.
In the first year since its inception, the Frontline Forum has recruited over 350 members from a myriad of public safety career backgrounds worldwide. Already, feedback loops are being established in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia. As we seek to better understand the localization of our products and better support the unique needs of individual clients, the feedback provided so far has been invaluable!
While the team was initially focused on reviewing the upcoming designs for the next generation of ProQA®, the Frontline Forum has also expanded to discuss a greater range of products supporting emergency services. Here’s what we’ve talked about so far this year.
In January, the Frontline Forum discussed and gave feedback on the pre-release of AQUA® 8, including previews of the installer, reports, and auditing features. Some of the takeaways from this session were: adding various timeout values, users being able to work with both a mouse and keyboard to navigate the system, including a future ability to add collaboration between ED-Qs, adding panel letter/number for the PDIs/PAIs in the actual review instead of only in the sequences, and having a secondary agency to keep confidential reviews for only those who need access to them. Thank you to everyone who was able to participate and provide these insights.
In February, the forum was among the first to hear news that the next generation of ProQA would be available both as a desktop program and in a Web-based browser application. The group's overall feedback was positive, and they were thrilled to have all three disciplines merged into one application. The Frontline Forum members also provided ideas for new features, which we will incorporate into our product backlog.
The March sessions introduced our Curriculum and Instructional Design team to the Frontline Forum for the first time. This team is responsible for certification courses, software courses, and software target lessons. We walked through a few police and medical training calls to gather information on how different Emergency Dispatchers answer protocol questions. Our team was also able to gather feedback on the importance of proper protocol knowledge and the usability of our training materials.
The Frontline Forum team held in-person sessions at the 2024 U.S. NAVIGATOR conference in Washington, D.C. Agencies were able to demo the pre-release of AQUA 8 and the development of ProQA Paradigm, providing critical feedback on our new designs and user preferences. The team will be holding more in-person demos at both the UK & Ireland and Euro NAVIGATOR conferences happening this fall.
The Frontline Forum is continuing to grow each month, and we hope you'll consider growing with us! We believe the people with the best ideas to support the many diverse communities we serve are those actively serving those communities. We hope to collaborate with all those interested to continue building better products and ultimately, building a better, safer world for us all.
If you would like to join the Frontline Forum, please click this link to be added to our monthly email list: https://bit.ly/PDCFrontlineForum. If you have questions, please reach out to Priority Dispatch’s Lead Product Manager Hillary McDaniel at product@prioritydispatch.net.
