2015-2017 / UX & Service Design Lead / NSW Department of Justice
‘Tyranny of distance’ makes communication hard between courts, families, lawyers, and those in prison
The State of New South Wales (NSW; larger than Texas or France and with many regional and remote communities) has one of the largest criminal justice jurisdictions in the world, with more courts than the United Kingdom. The ‘tyranny of distance’ implies that hundreds of individuals need to follow the circuit of the court to represent their interests.
To overcome the human and economic tolls of regional and remote travel for court appearances and legal consultation, Cisco Audio Visual Link (AVL) video conferencing systems have been used in the NSW Justice sector for many years. In 2014 the NSW government initiated a project to redesign the AVL service for all professional and public people in the Justice system to enable the delivery of fair and equitable justice by minimising the time delay and associated costs of physically moving people around the state to appear in court.
More than just a technical challenge
I was a UX and Service Design Co-Lead on the AVL redesign project (later named JustConnect) from 2015-2017 as part of an agile product development team based in Sydney.
I co-led the design of a new web and mobile platform for managing audiovisual appointments between correctional facilities, legal centres, families, police and witnesses. At its heart system design was about better communication between prisoners and their families, in completely different contexts to court or legal use. I performed many tasks, including:
Field research with lawyers, judicial officers, police and witness services to determine how the system might work best for them in their individual and/or organisational contexts.
Facilitating participatory workshops with justice users, bringing them together to voice their issues, desires, and criteria for what a successful solution might look like within different contexts of use.
Designing and testing room and staff calendar scheduling web and mobile prototypes with representative end users recruited from the Justice network in simulated courtroom, police, correctional facility and legal office environments to ensure the solution was usable, useful and viable.
Service mapping of actors, experience goals, metrics, and front and backstage channel considerations, showing where features, functions and capabilities fit together, and to determine the product release backlog and roadmap.
Working side-by-side with product owners, developers, change managers, business analysts and subject matter experts, to write and test user stories and put the solution into production.
Embedding user-centred design principles and approaches into the team.
Reflections & learnings
To date the most complex 'translation' -based project I have worked on, because of the the vastly different languages, protocols and technical requirements of each agency of Justice (e.g. Police vs. Corrections vs. Courts). Constant playback, communication and education of stakeholders across the different agencies was pivotal to building trust with such groups 'foreign' to design thinking approaches.
I helped embed user centred design into the DNA of the project. Over time, stakeholders saw value in this approach and began to understand why certain changes to their systems would be required, and what this would enable for diverse Justice stakeholder needs.
Legal and ethical constraints meant we had very limited access to people in correctional facilities and juvenile justice centres; we were essentially designing for them rather than with them. This remains a difficult challenge when working with the criminal justice system.
Cross-sector collaboration with the UTS Designing Out Crime (DOC) research centre allowed us to test digital prototypes within their physical prototypes which addressed basic ergonomic and technical recommendations for AVL studios in custodial contexts; this was invaluable to understanding how the whole service would fit together.