2016-2017
Agency: Globant Consulting (formerly WAE)
Client: London Metropolitan police
Role: PROJECT LEAD, STRATEGY, SERVICE & UX DESIGN
Team:
Designer: Micha Nicheva
Designer: Josh Stehr
User researcher: Spyridoula Oikonomou
User researcher: Zornitza Yovcheva
Strategist: Sophie O’Kelly
Strategist: Chris Dane
Content strategist: Stephanie Taylor
Copywriter: Ben Moran
Copywriter: Ray Christodoulou
Content producer: Patricia Wan
Since 2013, we have worked with the Metropolitan Police (the Met) to develop and implement a customer centred strategy, answering both the needs of the police and the public in the 21st century. Our vision is and continues to focus on addressing the universal public need for a digital channel as helpful, personal and reassuring as approaching an officer on the street.
Since April 2016, we have worked closely with the Met and our technical partner (CDS) to build the foundation for change, starting with a digital platform that provides new online services and a complete overhaul of the Met’s current content, to help them better educate and reassure the public. First launched to the public in October 2016, our beta website has since entirely replaced the existing Met website - at https://beta.met.police.uk/
Transforming the organisation in parallel was a crucial part of the process. You can’t bring offline services, online, without addressing how this new system will work within the remit of officers and staff’s day-to-day activities. We were fully embedded within the Met, ingraining a more agile and customer-centric way of working - even training 1200 officers.
We know that people don’t come to the Met website just to browse. They come primarily because they’re trying to carry out a task. The design and content strategy is centred around this insight and directs members of the public to the service or information they’re looking for, as quickly as possible. Using interactive triage tools and online forms, the site is always action-orientated, quickly and simply narrowing down the options to get to the specific advice or form most relevant to the individual. Making the public self-sufficient and offering new online reporting options for crime and road traffic incidents, has helped the Met reduce the volume of people that would have called for information, freeing up staff time to be used in new ways.
Signs of a channel shift are becoming clear. The volumes of online reports already form a significant part of the overall demand compared to the phone or paper forms and we can also see a reduction in calls regarding topics where the website provides new online services. This is constantly improving; throughout the project, our work has been highly iterative - co-creating and testing with users all along the process. The launch of beta in October 2016 allowed us to continue this testing on a much larger scale, using analytics, business metrics and user feedback to continue to make improvements. Now, several months in and without any external advertising of the new digital services, we are seeing significant impact on quality and speed of the reporting. This is just the beginning for providing a better service for the public, shifting demand away from the phones and keeping London safe - the future for digital has just begun.
This project has won several awards:
> Core 77 - Runner up in Service Design, and Strategy and research
> UX Design Awards
> Lovie Awards - Gold winner in Government & Civic - Winner in Best Navigation/Structure, Best Practices, Best User Experience, Web Services & Applications
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Want to know more about the project?
> A human centred approach to policing - Service Design Lab meetup - May 2017
> Creating a hub of digital services to better serve the public - Intersection conference - Barcelona - September 2017