Rave Panic Button Impacting Emergency Notification Workflow

Rave Panic Button, was first created by Rave in conjunction with Rave Mobile Safety's public safety customers in early 2014.  It was designed to shorten the response time to critical emergencies at a facility - a sort of emergency notification system on steroids in the hands of every teacher and administrator.  From a product development process perspective, it was one of the most collaborative efforts in which I have been involved.  From the outset, first responders, emergency management agencies, 9-1-1 and school officials were intimately involved in defining the right flow of information and user interfaces which would fit seamlessly into existing processes.  Many of these constituents had never walked through the end-to-end active shooter response process together.

Within the first 18 months of development, the results were pretty astounding:

• Our first deployment was for schools county wide in Snohomish County Washington
• Statewide deployment in Arkansas impacting tens of thousands of students and teachers
• Deployments in Delaware and New York that are tied into camera systems.
• Universities across the country have added Rave Panic Button into their safety operations
• And most important, the application has helped respond to incidents daily, from medical emergencies and potential active shooter

What was different about this process?  I think we do a good job of soliciting customer feedback on all of our initiatives, but this one was truly white boarded from the beginning with clients.  We spent hours working through the processes involved in responding to an emergency.  We prototyped and often went back to the drawing board.  Nothing was done in a vacuum.  Each of the constituents involved was incorporated into the development.

From a process standpoint, Rave Panic Button touches on a number of different entities, and had to be designed for a wide spectrum of sophistication of end-users, from the smartphone app, to the interface used by responders, to an administrative interface where users are authorized and the system configured. 

While it may seem simple, in product development we have to always remember to circle back to the customer.  Even though we had a good concept of how we thought the Rave Panic Button should work, the customer iteration turned the model on its head, greatly reduced the total time and cost to bring it to market, and resulted in a far more successful product in the end.