Description:

Our vision is to make New Zealand the safest country. To help achieve that goal, in 2014 we embarked on a multi-year program to equip all 12,000 frontline police with an iPhone and an ecosystem of iOS apps that have saved over 1.8 million hours of police time and more than 21 million pieces of paper. This program is known as the Mobility & Deployment Ecosystem.

“Queries” are the oxygen of frontline policing. During their working day, officers query people, places, vehicles, organisations and items to help inform decisions about whether those things present a risk to public safety.



Prior to the Mobility ecosystem, officers made queries using two-way radios connected to Communications Centres, where a separate team would run those queries against the National Intelligence Application. This limited the number of potential queries and resulted in officers making less queries than they might otherwise have made. There had to be a better way.

Today, the Mobility ecosystem gives officers the freedom and flexibility to complete queries at any time, directly from their iPhones. This ensures officers have the right information, in the right place, at the right time to support reducing crime and the drivers of crime.


Officers also need to complete forms and paperwork related to their field activity. Prior to the Mobility ecosystem, officers carried paper notebooks and completed paper forms. For instance, each time an officer attended a Family Harm (domestic violence) incident, they returned to the station to fill out a 13-page paper form. As a result, they were spending more time at the station than on the street.


As of July 2024, we have digitised 18 paper forms in the Mobility Ecosystem, including the Family Harm form. Digitising paperwork reduces the need to return to the station, so officers are more productive and visible within communities, improving feelings of safety for the public.


Over the last 10 years, the team have completed thousands of hours of collaborative research and development workshops, including taking our design and development team on ride-alongs with frontline officers, and undertaking scenario days using actors as criminals.


Throughout the process, our internal mantra of “fast, smart and easy” underpinned every aspect of the design and development process. The ecosystem has a shared design language that allows officers to seamlessly navigate between applications, reducing cognitive load and improving efficiency. A key goal was to create consistency in user interactions and behaviours between apps to achieve familiarity and increase learnability.

From fonts to iconography, from colour palette to terminology, consistency of user interactions achieves a cohesive experience across the ecosystem. Additionally, the apps use existing iOS paradigms to achieve consistency in user interactions and behaviours between apps.


Supt Mark Donaldson summarises the overall impact: “The Mobility ecosystem has revolutionised frontline policing in New Zealand through empathetic and considered design. It has improved public safety for all New Zealanders and is a world-leading program that we’re all very proud of”.