SERVICE DESIGNS FOR GOOD

The Citizens Advice Witness Service provides free and independent support for both prosecution and defence witnesses in every criminal court in England and Wales. It’s a very important service that guides people, which are sometimes victims themselves, in an empathetic, non-judgemental and friendly way.

While contracting for MadeTech I helped improve the Witness Service with a series of cost-effective recommendations based on a very comprehensive and intense series of interviews — with users, SMEs, team leaders and stakeholders.

I’ve mapped the whole service and co-managed the discovery process, leading the interviews, recruiting the interviewees, and writing the discussion guide. I led a couple of junior yet talented user researchers, and together we discovered how small changes could improve the service. For example, after talking to users we discovered that the phone number the service was using to confirm appointments was being shown as UNKNOWN, and that was putting some of the witnesses off. Calls from unknown numbers are associated with creditors, spam and other bad news. By changing that to a local number we augmented the number of positive engagements with the clients the service aims to help.