At CameraForensics, our core mission is to assist online intelligence investigators in their work safeguarding victims of child sexual exploitation and abuse, while identifying those responsible. With a wide array of partners around the globe, it’s a mission that we’re proud to be a part of.

As well as our commitment to innovating and enhancing our platform through the use of research and development projects, the creation of supporting materials like guides and training resources have also been a priority for us. This allows our users to grow in both confidence and efficiency when conducting research – reaching results more quickly and reliably than ever before.

Over the years, our approach to empowering users has been able to evolve alongside a rapidly developing tech landscape. What was once a small community forum where users could interact with each other and members of the CameraForensics team is now a dedicated knowledge base, including self-guided interactive courses, and much more. However, none of this would have been possible if we didn’t evaluate the entire end-to-end user journey.

Our training materials: why evaluate?

In the fast-paced tech landscape, it’s important that we assess our language, processes, and accessibility to ensure that our users are as confident as possible in using our platform to reach the results needed. While a key mentality in any thriving software company is to continue developing new and cutting-edge capabilities, we found that there was extremely high-value in re-evaluating our tools to make them even more useable. A core component of this is user training – supporting users in their knowledge, proficiency, and experience within the platform.

To scrutinise our current learning material, we adopted a user’s perspective to evaluate current communications, we discovered that the training and support of our users was riddled with inconsistent jargon and an assumption of background skills.

While taking on the perspective of our users was beneficial in developing and supporting their journey, this new view also helped us steer our direction as a company. This evaluation helped us to prioritise which projects to focus on and which new tools would improve the user experience as much as possible.

This assessment of our resources even led to us developing and releasing a new free tool, ExifExtractor, to enable our users to source required Exif data quickly and easily.

The creation of new learning materials

After we evaluated our past training resources, correcting inconsistencies in our language for clarity and adding additional information when needed, we turned our attention to creating new and engaging training resources.

One part of this was to take the most popular and frequently asked questions from our community forum, and create a new Knowledge Base. Constantly being added to, this resource features short videos providing a solution to common questions such as finding additional intelligence relating to a location or identifying the name of an individual from metadata.

With the videos providing visual solutions to common community issues, we knew that we were beginning to improve our training resources, but felt that more was needed.

Interactive courses

Creating courses that included interactive elements was an ideal next step. This not only allows our users to learn more about the platform, but enables them to practice the skills they have just learnt.

To help us create bespoke learning environments for our users, we turned to Plume, a creative agency specialising in developing interactive and engaging learning management systems. In providing a learning environment for our users, we hoped to not only build confidence but reinforce their knowledge by adopting a “learn by doing” approach. The new system guides users through several courses such as applying filters, locating and identifying devices, and performing a BigSearch using ExifExtractor.

Try out our courses for yourself here

Streamlining processes

Alongside the upheaval of our supporting material, we also sought to streamline our user experience within the platform as much as possible. This complemented our training courses by providing a sleek, optimised interface to help navigate more efficiently.

We’re always committed to improving our services, streamlining aspects such as the initial dashboard, the filters UI, and more. Have any feedback or want to suggest some improvements? Get in touch with us here.

Here to help

We know how important getting the help is when you need it, which is why we ensure that users always know how to contact us if they’re experiencing any issues or have any questions that haven’t been answered.

With multiple ways to get in touch with the CameraForensics team, we can continue providing support and advice to users long after they’ve completed the initial courses and searched through the Knowledge Base.

And there’s more to come

With the initial rollout of our training courses complete, we’re now turning our attention to the future. More courses are on the way and more articles are being added to our Knowledge Base regularly, as we continue to help provide knowledge, training. In doing so, we hope to support our users – accelerating their mission in the progress.

If you want to learn more about our determination to innovate our practices and platform, why not take a look at other aspects of our research and development here?