Background
Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) had considered introducing video calls in prison to strengthen family ties multiple times. However, the project never came to fruition. It involved a huge amount of work, particularly in terms of managing risk and introducing new ways of working.
Task
My team and I were very interested in this challenge so we prepared and delivered a pitch to Policy on how video calls could be tested in a user centred way.
The proposal was successful so we were given the opportunity to design a small pilot to test the use of video calls in four prisons. The pilot aimed to minimise risks and gain insights to inform next steps.
Role and approach
In October 2019 the pilot plan was approved, and we initiated a series of prison visits to uncover user needs and requirements for the service. In March 2020, prisons across England and Wales were forced to stop all family visits because of Coronavirus.
It became a matter of urgency to help people in prison stay in touch with family and friends. The team moved quickly to adapt to the changing situation and widen the scope from a pilot of four to a national rollout to all prisons in the country.
Part 1: Pilot the service (before Coronavirus)
During the pilot phase, my role was to:
Assist on interviewing prison staff, prisoners and their loved ones
Plan and support a heuristic assessment of potential providers of the video calling technology
Design various scenarios and stress test the software
Conduct an expert review on the software for secure video calls
Map out the journey and a blueprint for this new service
Work with the digital team, stakeholders and providers to design a service wraparound and any policies related to it – from the length or location of the call to who was allowed to take part.
Research in prison took place in and outside visit hours
Sketches done in observation in prison
More sketches from the provider’s interface
Close-up of the user flow: adding additional participants and verifying their identity
Overview of the user flow
Expert review: a snippet of the issues identified in the current flow alongside a series of recommendations for how to mitigate them
Journey map: as-is journey based on procured solution
Blueprint: how different actors and the technology interact on the front and back stages
Part 2: Deliver the service as an emergency measure (because of Coronavirus)
Once our team started to deliver video calls as an emergency measure, we all had to take on various roles. I focussed less on the product design and more on:
Collaborating with a content designer to publish guidance on video calls on GOV.UK
Training prison staff to use the video call software
Providing support for prisons throughout the service rollout
Demoing the technology to stakeholders
Working with senior designers to highlight accessibility issues
Working within contractual limitations to improve the video call software and user interface
Creating new processes for improving the in-call experience
Prototyping a long-term solution for video calls
Below are some examples of iterations I worked on with the provider to better support certain parts of the service, such as requesting and monitoring calls.
When reviewing requests for video calls, staff needed to bulk reject requests and to quickly scan for time slots. However, they weren’t able to do that in the original interface because of how the information was grouped. This meant time was lost by unnecessary clicks.
Before: List of calls for staff to review
Quick prototype of proposed design based on staff needs
After: Compromise achieved with the provider
When monitoring live calls, staff were alerted of any potential breaches to the policy. For example, if nudity appears on camera. The calls would pause automatically if any of this happened. Nevertheless, the existing alerts were not prominent enough so the risk of missing breaches were high, particularly when monitoring multiple calls at the same time.
Before: Alerts for monitoring officers were indicated by red outlines around the stream window and the contrast of the alert message was poor
Process: Prototyping alternatives in Miro and discussing options with the team
After: Introduction of overlay banners and changes to the background colour allowed greater contract on alert message
While working to improve the existing solution, I proactively started to think about what a future service could look like. A future where we would only procure the technology for the part of the journey we as an organisation did not have the skills to design, develop and deploy.
So I prototyped two approached which borrows from parts of or merges with the service friends and families use to visit someone in prison. I then took the rough user flow to a design critique to gain feedback.
Future journey: proposal for user flow with notes from a design critique
Results
This was definitely the most challenging and rewarding project I have ever worked on. From navigating commercial and technological constraints to working in a fast paced fully remote team, we enabled prisoners to see their loved ones during lockdown when no other form of face-to-face contact was available.
I am proud of what the team delivered because it made a difference to men, women and young people in custody. We went from four to 110 prisons in 6 months. This was the first digital service to became available in all public prisons in England and Wales.
Last time I checked about 2,000 secure video calls were held weekly.
After implementation, the service was handed over to a separate team to look after it. My wishes were for the new team to continue exploring the long-term vision for the service and to join the technology with other use cases, such as job interviews and legal appointments.
Read more about this project on MOJ Digital & Technology blog.