CICA Online
We designed a new digital service to replace and improve the actual paper base one for the Criminal Injury Compensation Authority.
I started as a software developer at the discovery stage (July 2016), but I mostly worked on User Research and Design until late in the private Beta stage (April 2018) in collaboration with the User Researchers and a Content Designer.
Challenges
- recruiting and interviewing victims of crimes
- most members of the team were new to Agile / Scrum and to User Centered Design when we started in 2016
- the service is complex so the outcome for the applicant is hard to anticipate in some cases
- tight timing
- some users have very low digital skills but we still want them to succeed first time
My Role
I was in charge of coding the high fidelity prototypes, using the prototype kit provided by the Government Digital Service, following closely their guidelines to comply with the Digital by Default policy of the GOV.UK.
I've been heavily involved with the user researchers and UX design work:
- creating personas based on phone calls recordings from our users, interviews with various stakeholders
- designing low fidelity wireframes of the various themes emerging from the user research discovery
- establishing our user journeys
- creating discussion guides prior to users interview
- taking notes during interviews or usability testing
- gathering insights via various methods (affinity mapping for example)
- creating scenarios for usability testing
- designing remediation and improvements to our design patterns, flows and content afterward
I created guidance documents to improve the team understanding of Agile / Scrum ways of working, the different forms of testing involved, the new collaboration tools (Jira, Confluence, Slack), Cucumber and BDD (Behavior Driven Development).
I tested the accessibility of our website and new functionalities prior to audits.
I contributed to the coding of the external users facing part of our service along two senior developers. We were using: JavaScript, EJS, NodeJS, Git, Swagger, Sails and Jenkins.
Helping users to upload documents
This is one of the functionalities we had to design for our service.
We researched how other services where doing it (Passport Office / Disclosure Scotland), then created paper wireframes, and tested it. Based on the outcomes, I created wireflow diagrams, coded a high fidelity prototype on which we did iterations of usability testing.
The flow diagram below was one of the possible solutions I created using Sketch. You can download the upload flow diagram as a PDF file.
Examples of blue guidance screens created for the prototypes and tested (Mobile views). I created the images which were used live. A potential new career as a hand model:
This was an ongoing project when I left in September 2018. The upload functionality had a much better success rate, even with low digital skills users, but we were still working to improve it.