Description:

Digital Notebook is a world-leading iOS application that allows the efficient recording and sharing of notes by frontline police officers on their iPhones, together with a timeline of their activities.

Frontline officers are the eyes and ears on the street for New Zealand Police. They need an efficient way to capture information that can be easily reused in other formats and openly available for other officers to support operational activity. Digital Notebook enables this.

Since its national rollout in early 2024, Digital Notebook has replaced the traditional paper notebook that was an essential tool for frontline officers for over 130 years. This new technology is an important step forwards for New Zealand Police, supporting greater collaboration and efficiency across the organisation.

Paper notebooks served their purpose for over 130 years; however, they often resulted in siloed information, illegible notes and misplaced evidence, leading to inefficiencies in the criminal justice system.

With Digital Notebook, frontline officers can capture information in a variety of ways, including digital sketches, text and signatures. Once submitted, a note can be searched and seen by other officers, taking what was once siloed information and making it instantly accessible across the entire organisation.

Often the simplest ideas are the most difficult to execute, and Digital Notebook was more than five years in the making. To better understand the needs of users, our team spent hundreds of hours workshopping scenarios with officers around the country and shadowing frontline police during their shifts.

Digital Notebook is part of an ecosystem of mobile products we've designed with NZ Police over the last 10 years. Our design principles are consistency, simplicity, clarity and ease-of-use. We want Digital Notebook and the other products in the ecosystem to be as intuitive as the consumer apps that officers use every day when they're off-duty.



NZ Police’s stated vision is for "New Zealand to be the safest country", and Digital Notebook is a key part of that vision. The app has been described by NZ Police as a "game-changer".



In simple terms, Digital Notebook makes frontline officers more efficient by enabling more accurate collection of evidence in more diverse ways; this in turn has helped create a more efficient justice system with more accurate and timely prosecutions.

Digital Notebook is a win-win-win for New Zealand Police, for the community and for society as a whole.