Within the design profession, there are many different roles, and many different subjects. Kjartan is a product designer in the Police IT unit (PIT) and works with the entire user journey. He designs the user experience within a product, which consists of one or more technical solutions.

– As a product designer in the police force, I work with everything from product strategy, innovation and user insights to creating good user-friendly solutions in interdisciplinary teams. Another part of my job is to help build a good product team within the police force, explains Kjartan.

When Kjartan is not in the field, he is often in the office at Majorstua in Oslo and working with the team on boards and walls with sketches and insights.

Large digital width

In 2022 and 2023, Kjartan will serve as design lead in the interdisciplinary team politie.no, a pilot team for product development in the police force.

The team is currently developing “mitt politiep.no” and a login service.

– Daily work life is very varied. One week, for example, I went to the operations center to understand how we were going to create future police records and disconnect from X.com, formerly Twitter. At the end of the week, I worked on how it would appear on the front page of politiep.no if you receive a simplified notification from an automatic traffic controller.

Now Kjartan is working in product field “From incident to resolved case”.

– Now I’m alternating between working with the police logged on politiet.no, and how we’re going to rivet the team and create concepts to drive future product development all the way from incident to resolved case. It’s great that you can move between different user domains, and as a designer put your skills to use for different parts of the social mission of the police.

It’s not just electricity on paper

Kjartan was previously part of a team developing an app for emergency police, called Trafikk.

– The precursor to this app was digital paper form, but we’re moving away from using electricity on paper to digitizing work. I have stood on many roads, wet and cold, alongside some of the world’s best police officers to understand what they really need in their everyday lives. The result is that we can deliver small and large changes every day, which are constantly adapted to how the app’s users work. The difference in value is huge when you don’t have to wait a month between updates.

In the Trafikk application, the police can use the cellphone camera to read license plates and driver’s licenses. The usual simplified summons for driving too fast can now be issued without the police officer having to open the telephone keypad.

– This means we can spend more time as a cop, and less time typing or fiddling with lots of keystrokes. It runs faster, but also feels better for those who receive fines in their digital mailbox. Building good dialogue is important in police work. But this is hard to do when you have to spend most of your time fiddling with unfriendly solutions.