Frustrated Queensland police are turning a blind eye to crime to avoid time-consuming data entry on the force’s new $100 million computer system…the latest phased roll-out of QPRIME, or Queensland Police Records Information Management Exchange…”They are reluctant to make arrests and they’re showing a lot more discretion in the arrests they make because QPRIME is so convoluted to navigate,”…jobs could now take up to seven hours to process because of the amount of data entry involved.

What I find most annoying is that a Queensland Police Service spokesperson said “…the benefits of the QPRIME system into the future far outweigh short-term disaffection by some officers…” which misses the point. It’s not officers’ disaffection that is the problem, it’s the larger impact on their ability to perform their duties!

I hear this all the time; “it’s not a big deal, users will get used to it”. But it’s the cumulative effect of all these “minor issues” that will affect usability, efficiency and in the case of police officers, the safety of our community.

Meanwhile, a similar story in the Washington Post describes how…

The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects…partly because the software offered limited options for classifying entries.

[Thanks to Dorian Taylor for the tip off regarding the Washington Post article via the IA Institute mailing list]

Some of this was exposed through the comments on a recent blog post regarding wireframes, in particular Chris’ comment on a sketchy wireframe stencil. So we’ve collectively been thinking about documenting and prototyping and how important “sketchiness” is.

To further fuel the discussion, I want to refer to Russell Wilson’s review of 16 user interface prototyping tools. I like how he categorises his “picks” into “Low fidelity mockups for idea exploration and communication”, “Interactive prototypes to test and communicate interactions” and “High fidelity drawing tool”. This is much more useful than saying one uses Axure (for instance) to prototype, like any one tool or technique could ever fit all situations. There are some interesting comments on Russell’s post too.

Also on this topic, Todd Warfel is running a survey on prototyping tools for his upcoming book. Be sure to check it out and have your say, this is adding some clarity around the various characteristics and pros and cons of prototyping techniques that will be of use to the entire community.

And it will help answer the question raised in the title of this post :)