The Challenge

The existing Appeals Service for the Inspectors is in need of modernising. The legacy system is outdated and not user-friendly. A new system will allow Inspectors to manage their work more easily without relying on Case Officers to manually move things along the workflow. 

My core responsibilities:
As the Senior Designer I was responsible for designing concepts for the screens, observing user testing with our Beta Inspectors, building HTML prototypes and presenting ideas back to the project board.

The Approach: 

Collaberation: Working with the users to make the solution as user centric as possible.
The first stage was to Identify the 2 main users of the back office system (Case officers and Inspectors) and how they work.

• Case Officers manage the appeal in the back-office system, moving it through the workflow, communicating with the parties and the Inspector and completing any admin tasks. 
• Inspectors are planning experts who weigh up the evidence from the appellant/agent and the Local Planning Department, conduct a site visit and make the final decision on the appeal. 

The second stage was to create co-design sessions – validate and feedback on the blueprint and process maps, sessions to design the back office journeys  After mapping out these user journeys I created screens in Balsamiq and added them to a Miro Board to share with other team members and work on iterations with Content Designers, Business Analysts and the programme manager.

I then sought feedback from the Inspectors from fortnightly show and tells. This provided great engagement and feedback, lots of questions and useful suggestions that were fed into the backlog .

• Updated the journey for booking a site visit after initial User Research sessions with our Beta Inspectors.
• Changes to the content order and layout of screens following the research feedback from card sorting.
• Created a series of screens in the Government Design Toolkit hosted on Heroku. These conform to the approved styles, components and patterns in the Design System
• Met our Beta Assessment so project can proceed to private Beta.

Secondary navigation pattern (for approval)
https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system-backlog/issues/138

Accordion pattern (for approval)
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/accordion/