People do not experience justice services as fragmented products or user flows. While we have to create artificial product boundaries and team divides to deliver a service, the experience of the end user does not mirror these divides. In real life, people’s journeys cross different systems and processes. Improving one part in isolation is rarely enough.
Beneath that cohesive experience, at the heart of MoJ service transformation, is complexity. How can digital service delivery at its best simplify complexity at a strategic level and create smooth, unified experiences?
What Really is Complexity?
According to systems thinking, complexity describes interconnected systems. The difference between a complex system and a complicated one is predictability. Interconnectivity is complicated when connected parts impact each other predictably. Contrastingly, the behaviour of complex elements and how they will affect each other is often unpredictable, with change emerging over time. Outcomes can never be entirely known.
Let’s Get Strategic: Smarter not Harder
There is a principle in UX law that systems come to mirror the team structures that build them, known colloquially as the ‘pants over trousers’ rule. Similarly, it’s easy for this to occur in reverse: methods come to mirror system complexity. Teams introduce many varied, tactical solutions with a whack-a-mole effect, rather than stepping back and looking at wider strategy.
Thanks to their brilliance, our teams tackle this complexity skilfully and willingly. However, we understand that it’s inevitable among proactive teams that solutions-at-speed pop up that are tactical, rather than strategic: Localised, short-term improvements in isolated areas can lead to the creation of new issues, potentially taking a toll on efficiency and even wellbeing.
So, which strategic initiatives support complexity? Here are a few we have found work well…
End-to-End Research Benefits All
Historically, the Crime Applications service consisted of several, siloed product teams, some on legacy and some on newly transformed parts of the product. User researchers from four teams collaborated to design usability testing for the entire end-to-end journey across both legacy and transformed services.
End-to-end insight revealed previously unseen offline tasks, which were then prioritised and incorporated into the digital journey.
Ultimately, this uncovered how the products work together as one, rather than in isolation, replicating how they are really experienced. The result was not only a more cohesive and consistent experience. The initiative encouraged closer ways of working between teams, who continue to develop a shared strategy to improve the end-to-end journey holistically.
Dig a Little Deeper: root-causes
Bringing teams together can take different shapes and forms. When challenges and blockers have come to seem intractable, we have found the Five Why workshop format allows us to come together and collectively uncover root causes. The format moves beyond the obvious issue by repeatedly asking ‘why?’ to get closer to the underlying cause. It follows basic if/then logic, applying cause-and-effect thinking.
We recently joined two teams together, where one team represented user submissions and the other represented users assessing submissions. Merging the teams meant both sides of the service interaction could be considered as one whole and allowed for closer collaboration. During the merger, we ran a Five Whys workshop to better understand the root causes where collaboration had created delays or uncertainty. This helped us understand where the real gaps were and how they connected across the service, rather than looking for a solution within a single team.
Single-Source-of-Truth
Wherever possible, we try to create a single source of truth to support collective understanding at a higher-level.
Recently within Legal Aid Agency Digital (LAAD), we collaborated with policy colleagues to create detailed journey maps of the crime and civil end-to-end. This has supported conversations between policy, digital and operations to decide which steps in the process are ripe for 'simplification', change that requires not just a new digital skin but changes to the rules that govern things. Our researchers and service designers combined our disparate insights into one map, which they shared among different disciplines across the business to both validate and discuss implications.
Creating a ‘visual map’ like this enables us to demonstrate impact on users more effectively than written reports. Senior stakeholders can see the ‘headlines’ at a glance. Similarly, a single service blueprint is invaluable, even more so when it includes issues experienced by users. A single log of user needs allows strategic needs (those that shape real product change) to be highlighted.
Powerful Insights
The Justice Research team is creating a central research repository, using AI to bring insights from across the organisation together. The aim is to enable us to look across services, agencies and teams to understand common, powerful themes and issues across the justice system.
However sometimes holistic insight is a happy side-effect. Wherever possible we have tried to centre cross-cutting activities around knowledge-share that actively strengthens collective insight, which in turn enhances cohesive product quality.
Cross-cutting Justice Design Crits, for example, have the incidental benefit of requiring people to share why they would suggest certain improvements, whether it’s due to previously little-known caseworker way-of-working or a provider need. As a result, group understanding of justice users grows together, as well as embedding that group intelligence into the product. People become a guardrail for quality.
Beyond Artificial Siloes
To get a complex usable product across the line it’s necessary to be product orientated. However, this can lead us to overlook the fact that digital products play only a small - and hopefully supportive - part in rich, real experiences.
To combat this, over the last nine months in LAAD, we have established a small working group whose aim is to understand how the LAAD product is experienced, as a whole. The group consists of one service designer and two user researchers with the benefit of working primarily outside product teams. Their insights are not constrained to product silos and instead reflect the holistic way end users truly access a product.
This helps us think beyond product boundaries and identify opportunities for service transformation that we may not have previously identified. The team is identifying gaps in our understanding as an organisation, prioritising those discovery opportunities with the greatest potential for impact.
‘Beta’ is Better than Never (and Sooner is Best!)
Kicking off these types of initiatives sooner rather than later has several perks. Discovery is exponentially richer, more insightful and impactful. Teams grow together and are more adaptable to change.
Laying down a stable foundation ensures quality later. Activities like exploratory end-too-end research and root cause analysis give teams the opportunity to think slow, as well as fast. Implementing them from the start creates cohesion of both insight and people.
What’s the golden thread across these examples? A holistic view is invaluable.
It is a common sentiment that simplifying complexity is part of user-centred design; but we cannot do that without stepping out of the weeds to identify how parts of the user experience connect and to scan for what is being overlooked. It is often only a bird’s eye view that allows you to see the most impactful, simple solutions that align with the daily lives of users.
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