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Comment by zavulon | Hacker News Reader

I work for a company called Mark43.

We make software to help police officers do their jobs more efficiently - our applications literally help save lives. There's a lot of interesting design challenges - for example, emergency dispatchers look at our CAD (computer aided dispatch) software for many hours on large monitors.. how do you design it so their eyes don't get tired?

And then cops look at the same software on their laptops, as they're driving to respond to an emergency.. how do you make a notification "suspect is armed" stand out so they notice it among all other data?

We are looking for designers to help us solve these and other problems:

Product Designer: https://www.mark43.com/careers/700918/?gh_jid=700918

Sr. Product Designer: https://www.mark43.com/careers/119568/?gh_jid=119568

(New York City)

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Why do you call the position "product designer" when it is definitely asking for UX designers? I mean, when I think "product designer" I think industrial design, but this is clearly on the software side.

Ah, I guess this is common confusion; from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_design:

> Product design is sometimes confused with (and certainly overlaps with) industrial design, and has recently become a broad term inclusive of service, software, and physical product design. Industrial design is concerned with bringing artistic form and usability, usually associated with craft design and ergonomics, together in order to mass-produce goods.[4] Other aspects of product design include engineering design, particularly when matters of functionality or utility (e.g. problem-solving) are at issue, though such boundaries are not always clear.[5]

A digital product designer is basically a UX designer with knowledge of product management. While UX rely only on the user experience and the constraints of the user environment, the P.D. have to incorporate (and understand) business requests, production workflow, ect.

That really isn't different from what a UXD already does, and it definitely doesn't require any ID skills. You might want to cast your net for just plain old UXDs, rather than people who have been trained specifically in product design (if there is indeed a real specialty there, I doubt that's true).

> how do you make a notification "suspect is armed" stand out so they notice it among all other data?

Can we make "please don't shoot random black people" a notification that they'll notice?

I saw Mark43 a while ago and haven't been able to stop musing about it since - I think it would be rewarding work knowing if you excel at your job you're helping save lives and reduce risk!

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