Background
The UK Ministry of Justice has been looking at improving the experience for parents who have separated and are making child arrangements.
A digital service for parents to apply to court about child arrangements has been launched but this is only one touchpoint in the wider journey of making child arrangements. More could be done to improve the end to end experience of parents and that is what I tried to achieve during my time in this team.
Task
When I joined the team, our goal was to ensure a smooth experience for parents pursuing the court pathway through our digital service but also to nudge couples away from court when safe and appropriate to do so.
Role and approach
During my six months in this team, I tackled both challenges. I have done that in three parts:
Part 1: Iterations to the live service
I worked closely with a developer and a content designer to iterate and roll out new features on our existing live services – such as a postcode lookup which increased CTA by 192% and reduced the number of users who dropped out of the journey.
Before: Hyperlink to ‘Find a mediator’ on Step 1
After: Postcode lookup to ‘Find a mediator’ increased CTA by 192%
Part 2: Designing new products
As part of promoting alternative ways to reach an agreement, I supported product and delivery managers by leading workshops with policy colleagues and stakeholders to inform the team’s roadmap.
A very strong hypothesis of mine was that the guidance available did not allow parents to compare options available. To test this hypothesis I came up with a few concepts:
Use animations to explain the pros/cons of the options available to separating parents.
Introduce a comparison table to highlight the different aspects of the options available. For example, court can be cheaper but parents will need to pay again if they need to change their arrangements.
Provide personalised guidance through an online service that indicates what is likely to be the best option for parents based on their circumstances.
1. Animation: Storyboard used to get feedback and agree the content with digital team
2. Comparison table: Sharing my work in progress with senior designers to get feedback
Design tested with users: https://helpwithchildarrangements.service.justice.gov.uk/comparison-table
3. Personalised guidance: Prototype built in 3 days for ‘check your options for child arrangements’
The service filters down options based the parents’ circumstances
Part 3: Testing the use of alternative content formats
Another contribution of my work in this space was to experiment with alternative media to increase parents’ access to information. Policy colleagues wanted to introduce a chatbot and through various conversations we persuaded them to drift away from implementing a solution to exploring a wider hypothesis:
If parents in crisis receive information in a different format (in comparison to ‘flat’ content), they are more likely to engage with the content and find relevant information to solve their issues
To test this hypothesis, I reused existing content and designed four experiments:
A chatbot
A video
An audio guide
A series of ‘bite sized’ emails
I drafted a test plan for this and worked with developers to get the experiments live. Once they’ve been all tested, I analysed the data (from Google Analytics, Landbot, YouTube, SoundCloud and Mailchimp) and playbacked findings to the team.
Design specs for experiments: chatbot, video, audio guide and mailing list
Chatbot: second iteration http://cait-mediation-bot.herokuapp.com/
Results
Our team was was able to:
Improve the experience of parents who are making child arranging by continuously iterating our live service based on user feedback and releasing new products – such as the ‘Five reasons you should go to mediation’ video which has had 400+ views
Quickly de-risk the urge for investing in a chatbot. By testing a wider hypothesis around alternative content formats, we identified what users our users really need: deeply personalised content and human connection.
Not all prototypes I designed have been implemented – and that’s ok. They were useful to test hypotheses and uncover user needs, and have informed future work. When I left this team, they were looking at redesigning one of their products based on the outcome of my work.
Read more about what I learnt when I tried to get away from flat content in this talk I delivered at various conferences, including Service Design in Government and the content conference ConCon.