Profchecks is a digital learning platform for the Dutch Police, built to make learning legislation less of a chore and more something you’d actually want to open. Officers and students have to learn how to apply the law in real situations, and for a long time the tools on offer felt like a difficult chore. We wanted to change that: quick, practical, and gamified, closer to Duolingo than to a law book.
I designed both sides of the platform.
Player experience
A gamified learning environment for Police Academy students and police officers across the Netherlands. Players work through realistic incidents, make decisions and answer questions on Dutch criminal procedure, preparing for situations they might face on the street. A map view and a list view make finding an incident feel more like exploring than being assigned homework, and a personal dashboard shows progress in one glance: strengths, weaknesses, top incidents and top scores.
User interviews shaped how it’s used. Some people wanted to sit down at a computer with their law book for a longer study session. Others wanted a quick 10 minutes on their phone while waiting on cordon duty. So the question flow is built to be easy to open, easy to finish, and easy to pick back up if you have to put the phone down. The Dutch criminal law reference library is always close by.
Login
Logging into Police Academy applications used to be complicated, mostly because of security requirements. We redesigned the login and turned it into a template used across all Police Academy applications, so it’s consistent and easy wherever you start. The result was far fewer login issues and fewer calls to the help desk.
Admin / CMS
The other side is the platform educational specialists use to create, manage and publish content. The challenge was making something powerful enough for specialists but still intuitive. It includes:
– Incident dashboard: details and key statistics per incident, plus creating and editing.
– Incident editor: build an incident from scratch, with six question types and extra case information to help players answer, and clear feedback to amplify learning.
– Question bank: manage all questions that feed the quickfire round and question of the day, including variations of each question.
How we worked
I worked closely with product owners, educational specialists, developers and other stakeholders, running user research, prototyping and usability testing with both learners and content creators. That shaped and validated the experience on both sides, from how officers learn to how educational teams build and maintain the content.
