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franbencosme

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Product design · since 2008
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Reportero · Dominican government · 2024 · 6 months

An app where a reportstays open until it’s solved.

Reportero is an app from the Dominican government for citizens to file reports with state institutions. Most tools like it are a form with a send button, and the citizen never hears back. Here, every report is assigned to an institution and stays open until that institution posts proof it was solved. I designed the whole app, after spending twenty days in the field with the people who would use it: police stations, city halls, communities and the National Palace.

The Reportero dashboard on a laptop — total cases, open, finished, active reporters, institutions — and a reporter’s profile on a phone
The admin dashboard: reports by day, by month and by institution, with a citizen’s profile beside it.
At a glance
What I did
The product vision, the design of the whole app, and twenty days of field research
What I did not do
The back end and the data. A mobile developer, two back-end engineers and a data scientist built what I designed.
Time
6 months, from the first question to the last screen
With whom
1 mobile developer · 2 back-end engineers · 1 data scientist · the product owners
For whom
Citizens, police officers, state institutions and administrators
The problem

Most government reporting tools are just a form with a send button, and the citizen never hears back. If a report doesn’t reach someone responsible for it, it isn’t a service. It is a message nobody answers.

The app had six kinds of users, each needing something different from the same report: citizen, officer, zone, institution, administrator and super-administrator.

The issues board: what could go wrong for the citizen, the supervisor, the super admin and the institutions, as sticky notes in columns
Before designing any screen, I mapped what could go wrong for each kind of user. Two problems showed up for all of them: fake progress updates, and reports that never get closed.
Four screens of the alpha: the case list, a case thread, the incident form, the profile
The first version the officers tested: report list, conversation, form and profile.
What the brief got wrong

The brief described a user who turned out not to exist. We were told the officers would struggle with a phone app. In the police stations we found that the average officer was over forty and used a phone perfectly well. We learned that by going there, not in a meeting.

Twenty days across the country before designing the first screen.

Fran Bencosme running a testing session with police officers in a station meeting room
One of the field sessions. The real users were nothing like the brief.
Fran Bencosme presenting Reportero at a lectern in Provincia Duarte, the project slide on the screen beside him
Presenting the app in Duarte province. We worked on site, where the app would be used.
What changed starteddroppedbecamekept
  1. Started as — a report with a status, a priority and an institution responsible for it.
  2. Dropped — the user the brief described. Twenty days in the field proved that user wrong, and every screen designed for them went too.
  3. Became — a conversation that only closes when the institution posts proof the problem was solved.
  4. Kept — the core rule: a report closes with proof, or it doesn’t close. That rule is the product, and it survived every version.
The life of a case: the reporter creates it with the citizen, takes it to the institution, the institution resolves it, the reporter notifies with evidence, the administrator reviews
How a report moves from opened to closed. It can only close with evidence.
Two real screens of the Reportero app: the list of cases with state and priority, and the thread of one case with the institution’s replies
The report list and the conversation. Every report has a status, a priority, an owner, and a conversation that stays open.
Results

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