Finding rehabilitative programmes

Quick summary

The challenge here was to help probation practitioners find the right rehabilitation activities for a person in prison. For example, courses to address issues like substance abuse or managing relationships. I worked with a Service Designer to lead the team through a short design sprint and start the design phase.

My key outcomes:

  1. Worked with the existing team to analyse research and define the problems to be solved.
  2. Led ideation workshops and built the first prototype.
  3. Collaborated with a User Researcher to test the prototype, which received consistently positive feedback.

Taking the team from discovery to analysis and design

This design sprint included a review of discovery research, sessions defining scope, and ideation sessions. These helped to identify the key problems for the project:

  • deciding which accredited programmes are suitable for a specific person's needs
  • checking that the person's schedule in prison aligns with the programme's dates
  • automating this process versus letting probation practitioners use their expert judgement
A digital whiteboard showing various opportunities for the project on post-its. They are grouped into themes.
Prioritising opportunities in the form of 'How might we' statements.
A digital whiteboard with sketches and mock-ups of different people's ideas. There are also post-its describing each idea.
Leading a remote ideation session.

High-fidelity prototyping and user research

Taking the best ideas from the sprint, I built a prototype in Figma, which we tested with 7 probation practitioners and took through one round of iteration.

A mock-up of a landing page for the 'Search for an intervention' service.
A high-fidelity design of the landing page for the service.
A mock-up of a page for searching for a specific prisoner by their number or personal details.
Pulling in a prisoner's data automatically and comparing the details of their needs to what programmes offer.
A search results page with a list of programmes and an open filter menu.
Search results automatically matched to the person's needs and ordered by relevance.
A page showing the details of a specific programme. It includes an overview, description and locations.
Programme details with concise descriptions, nearby locations and links to start referring the person.

Next steps

The prototype received positive feedback from all user research participants, with relatively small tweaks for the next version.

I moved to another project soon afterwards, but this was a good example of using a short design sprint to take a team quickly from discovery to initial solution.

View more of my work

Two Accurx screens overlapping. One is a workspace list page and the other shows an inbox.
Two Accurx screens overlapping. One is a workspace list page and the other shows an inbox.