Project Description
WorkSafe Victoria’s (WorkSafe) Injury Hotspots tool provides an industry-wide snapshot of how people get injured at work.
It pinpoints areas on the body that are most likely to be injured and offers a list of solutions that can help reduce the risk of the injuries occurring.
Injury Hotspots is a quick and easy tool to raise awareness of safety in your workplace. You can use it for:
- training and induction
- promoting general safety awareness
- promoting your Occupational Health and Safety program.
Injury Hotspots Project
This project started in 2008 and was Steve Wardle’s first major project at WorkSafe that included a total end to end concept to delivery. The project included many halves and full day workshops that helped us align on:
- Business objectives
- Personas and target audience
- Content needs
WorkSafe had the data and knew where and how injuries were happening, the problem was how can we take those number and create an interactive tool that would intuitive and educational. With some of the bigger questions answered, the idea we came up with was to create a visual hotspot tool for each industry (48 different industries), which would be self-contained and could link to the other industries.
In 2008 the first version of the Injury Hotspots tool was built in flash and featured a 3D spinning character model with relative danger hotspot bubbles that show the percentage of injuries to a body part and are different sizes according to the percentage shown. Activating the hotspot would bring up information about those injuries or risks, and solutions about how to improve workplace safety in those areas. Steve created every element in 2008 project, including project management, running the user workshops, the design, and the 3D character, built the prototype and the final flash application and carried out UAT. Fundamental usability was challenged with flash not being the best tool for the user to extract content, this was overcome by creating downloadable print PDFs and the ability to order pre-printed A3 size posters.
The hotspot tool was so successful that it was purchased by other safety governing bodies around the world and many universities used it as a training tool.
The tool has gone through many iterations over the years, and the current version was recreated with the help of external agency Butterfly, who also helped implement a nifty automated HTML to PDF poster creator, which draws on the same data at the website. The injury hotspots keep growing in success and the latest version won Steve awards for innovation and collaboration, and also picked up some recognition in various design awards.
Various injury hotspot iterations over the years:
