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Manage cases in a simple, accessible and efficient way

Client
HM Courts & Tribunals Service
Industry
Government
Year
2018

Overview

The Judicial case manager is part of a £1 billion programme involving over 50 projects to change and improve the Courts and Tribunals Service to bring new technology and modern ways of working.

Our role was to create a user interface that would enable and support Judges and other members of the judiciary, working within the reformed services to manage their cases in a more efficient way.

Mockups to tease out requirements with Judges

My process

I started designing with low-fidelity prototypes which consisted of sticky notes and hand-drawn sketches which helped brainstorm.

Balsamiq helped me quickly create rough concepts to test scenarios with judges.

Later, I created hi-fidelity mockups using Sketch to get an overall look and feel for the interface and to design a collection of reusable components for the service.

Sketches, sticky notes, planning, and research
Digital case file design
Questions and answers design
Case details landing page design

Prototyping in code

Later, I moved Sketch designs into prototype code. This took time to ramp up but once I did, it was very fast to prototype new features.

Presenting an interactive, realistic user experience helped to spot usability failures within the service and ensured user needs were at the center of every design decision.

Research and analysis

Research visits around England included 12 locations, 25 participants and over 104 hours of research. We also worked with individual service lines to use their research saving us a lot of time and duplication of effort.

From our research we defined:

  • a set of user needs for each service line
  • a core set of user needs for the Judicial case manager
  • a set of personas describing our main user types
  • understanding of the current user journeys for each service line
User testing with a Judge in Guildford Magistrates’ Court and Family Court

Collaborative delivery

I worked with product owners, business analysts, user researchers, content designers, developers and delivery managers adopting Agile principles.

Every individual brought their own set of skills and expertise, to transform the Courts and Tribunals system.

Divorce user journey designs

The results

We delivered a highly complex end-to-end digital service for judges to manage their cases.

This incorporated and met the needs of the following service lines:

  • Divorce
  • Financial Remedy
  • Social Security and Child Support (SSCS)
  • Civil Money Claims (CMC)
  • Probate
  • Public Law

My involvement includes:

  • UX/UI Design and Interaction Design
  • User Research and Analysis (end-users)
  • Web Development (HTML, SASS, JavaScript)
  • Design System and Style Guide
  • Prototyping (Balsamiq, Code)
  • Accessibility Standards