The Officer Actions module is designed to supplement our RMS product for agencies that want more data about use of force, person/vehicle searches, and the other high liability activities that your agency engages in. Powerful analytics compare demographics and other relevant information against your Officer’s in-field activity to provide unique insights into how your agency engages with the public. Let the data work FOR your agency with EFORCE® Officer Actions.

Technology writer Glenn Fleishman found that issue. "Even in 2013, I would get emails asking people how to do things in the app. When I told them to click the three buttons in the corner of the app, people would ask, 'Oh, why did you hide it there?'"

Located in East Texas, the Jacksonville Police Department is a spectacular example of modern policing success. Chief Joe Williams and his staff spend more time serving and protecting their community by reducing the amount of time they spend on paperwork.

And submissions are a breeze too! With a couple of mouse clicks we compile your submission and do a final validation check. If there’s errors, we give them to you in plain text with a link to the issue. Then you simply push submit, and it’s transmitted directly to the state. Simple to fix, simple to submit.

JPD utilized NIBRS Compliance Grant funds to purchase EFORCE® in 2018, and their administration has worked diligently to shape their system into a tool to maximize their productivity.  Regarding their partnership with EFORCE®, Chief Williams said, “They’re committed to our agency’s success. They take the time to work with us and ensure that our system works the way we want it to.”

The designer put the three lines he drew to represent a menu of additional actions to the back of his mind for more than 30 years, until the design world began to scrutinise his creation. "It was simply one very small aspect of the overall graphical user interface," Cox explains.

"People err towards icons because they're smaller and you don't have to do localisation. German or Dutch can take a four-letter word and turn it into a 20-letter word," says Wroblewski.

Before the hamburger was tucked away in the corner of everyone's smartphones, another generation of designer referred to a similar symbol as an "air vent", according to Norm Cox, an American graphic designer.

Approximate symbol

EFORCE® RMS is designed and refined by Patrol Cops, Records Clerks, Administrators, etc. who know a thing or two about NIBRS. First off, we know that there’s usually only a couple people at an agency that even knows what NIBRS is (let alone the nuances of how to report every type of incident).  We also know that more than likely, that person is shouldering the entire NIBRS reporting load for your agency. There’s a better way, with EFORCE® RMS!

The Star's user interface featured a series of command buttons. "At the right of this line of buttons was the infamous 'hamburger' icon menu, containing additional options for the contents of the window such as formatting and pagination," says Cox, now 63 and still designing user interfaces.

"The first big app that used a hamburger button was Path, I believe," says Alex Tyagulsky, an app designer. "Then it was popularised by Facebook, and the hamburger button started to appear from app to app and many apps started to use them."

And people are getting used to the hamburger button - albeit slowly. Foster carried out his first test on users in early 2014, and has been testing since. Users do seem to understand it more.

EFORCE® RMS allows you to map the data from your incident reports to those forms! Auto-populate them with a click of a button.

And if the menu button is unremarkable and unrecognisable, it has a knock-on effect on the options it contains. "When you hide something in the hamburger menu, you make it less discoverable by your users," says Tyagulsky.

Mathematical logic symbol

This even extends outside your agency. EFORCE® puts your agency in the driver’s seat to decide what information you share with outside agencies. You can decide what divisions you share with surrounding agencies, and at what level each agency can see your reports.

On apps, translating simple words and phrases such as "menu" or "send to printer" - known as "localisation" is costly and can cause problems. The German word "Systemsteuerung" is nearly twice as long as its English-language equivalent, "settings".

"I did multiple tests," says James Foster, a web developer based in New Zealand, who has surveyed users' interactions with the button over the course of many months. "The results all came out the same - the icon is not as clear to some users as developers and designers think it is."

As computer screens became bloated, more menu items were added. "The hamburger icon, used most egregiously, allows you to put 500 options into a mobile app without doing the hard work of actually figuring out what belongs there," says Wroblewski.

Nobody knows how reports flow through your agency better than you. We make tools, not policy and procedure. You’ll have the flexibility to setup workflow the way you want it. Divisions tie seamlessly with workflow. Create a special division and keep those records on a need-to-know basis.

Officers classify the incident using terminology they’re familiar with, and we set required fields in their report for them. By removing the guess work you create an entire agency of NIBRS experts. Your reports will be validated before you even start the narrative.

Why use the hamburger at all? Though smartphone screen clarity has made great leaps forward in recent years, three thin lines are still easier to render and read on all phones than the word "menu". And not everyone speaks English.

These three lines have gained a personality, and a name - the hamburger button, because stripped back to its constituent parts, it looks slightly like a hamburger inside two halves of a bun.

Open up a smartphone, tablet application, or a website these days, and you're likely to see an odd icon slung somewhere up in the top corner of the screen.

EFORCE® Software is the perfect coupling of connectivity and security. Modern technology facilitates the safeguarded availability of our full software suite on any internet connected device. We strictly adhere to the FBI’s CJIS Security Policy, applicable state regulations, and industry best practices in the design and implementation of our software solutions.

"At Xerox we used to joke with our initial users that it was an 'air vent to keep the window cool'," says Cox. "This usually got a chuckle, and made the symbol more memorable and friendly."

This module also does double duty for agencies with State mandated Use of Force, Bias and Integrity Reporting requirements. It can be easily interfaced with many State’s databases for direct submissions saving your entire agency time in entering, compiling, and submitting this data.

Three horizontal lines stacked on top of one another, looking like an equals sign gone wrong. Tap or click on the lines, and then you realise, it's a menu.

Doing work more than once is antiquated. But we know your Court, Lab, DA’s Office, etc. isn’t going to budge on wanting your information on their form. But your agency is wasting time re-doing work by filling out their forms. It’s time to modernize!

Foster is relatively outspoken about the drawbacks of the hamburger icon. "It's three horizontal lines," he says. "It's pretty easy not to notice it. It means different things to different people; it doesn't necessarily say, 'Here are more things to look at'."

In other words, the basic principle of out of sight, out of mind. As Luke Wroblewski, a designer who has spoken at conferences about the rise of the hamburger, says: "That can have detrimental effects on engagement."

You don’t have time to do work twice, so EFORCE® takes the information from your CFS in CAD and drops it into RMS so you can start ahead of the game. But we don’t stop there; we get smart to save you time.

EFORCE® RMS has loads of pre-canned statistical reports for the common stuff. Use our Ad Hoc Reporting tool to make your own custom stat sheets. Take it up one more level by automating those reports with the scheduled reporting feature.

The button has its benefits, he says. "The biggest one is you can put a lot of information inside it, and at the same time provide a consistent way to find this extra information. Facebook is a great example of this."

The inventor of the hamburger - or air vent - is sanguine about his legacy. "Though I don't condemn or condone its usage today, my guess is it's probably here to stay," says Norm Cox. "All the 'controversial' discussion about it has burned it even more into our digital vernacular."

Report approval and workflow are designed specifically for the working supervisor. Use the approval tools in RMS to provide feedback and efficiently move incident reports around your agency. You can also use the EFORCE® Mobile App to approve narratives and incident reports from anywhere you’ve got service for a truly convenient way to approve incidents!

Like it or not, your agency is in the spotlight on every interaction you have with the public. And in the absence of data about those encounters, your agency is at the mercy of what someone else wants to say, truthful or not.

”EFORCE® aided our ability to become NIBRS compliant. The software is designed to ensure when your work is done, the reports sent to the FBI NIBRS will be checked prior to submission which prevent kickbacks.

(Full disclosure: The BBC News website and its smartphone apps use the hamburger icon in various formulations - sometimes by itself, and sometimes in a box or alongside a word.)

Why go through all the trouble to enter information into your system, if you can’t get it back out? If you’ve ever had to put together a complicated statistical report for administration, then you know how frustrating it can be to bounce around your system, looking for each piece. Heaven forbid you had to tabulate stats by hand! We’ve been there, which is why Data Analytics isn’t just something we threw in the software to check a box. Just like everything else we build, we took our time and designed tools that work the way you want them to. It’s your system, and you’re in control.

The hamburger button has become a common symbol on our smartphones, tablets and computers. But, Chris Stokel-Walker asks, what is it, where did it come from, and do people really know what it means?

EFORCE® Incident Reports are laid out so that the report builds on the work you’ve already done. EFORCE® is built to prevent your agency from entering information more than once.

And like the hamburger, which has become a culinary cornerstone across the world, the hamburger button is rapidly spreading its way across the internet and on to our smartphones via apps.

Designed to streamline incident reporting and approvals, take the time out of statistical reporting and analysis, and help your agency connect with other agencies like never before, EFORCE® RMS is the clear choice to help your agency succeed!

”EFORCE® provides a capable RMS software with a very reasonable price. We know you’ll like the ability to extract data for reports and statistics.

In the late 1970s and early 80s, Cox worked for Xerox, designing the first graphical user interface - the icons and toolbars we take for granted today - for an early office workstation called the Xerox Star.

We’ve been in business since 2003, and we still haven’t met anyone who can honestly say they like report writing. But the fact is (especially these days), a quality report is not only necessary for securing a conviction, but also for keeping the doors open. With funding and public policy tied to State and Federal reporting programs like NIBRS, now more than ever your agency needs a system that can guide officers through those complicated reporting requirements.

However while the button may provide a consistent way to find extra information, research suggests it is not as functional as some might like to think it is.

The pioneers of computing championed a style of design in which digital elements resembled real world objects that anyone could recognise. Behind the glass screen lay a "desktop" on which users could arrange "documents", or drop them into the "trash" - an icon in the shape of a bin. The idea is known as "skeuomorphism". It predates Jobs and persists to this day.