Building a new digital service for HMPPS

The challenge

In 2019, Joseph McCann was given 33 life sentences for a series of violent and sexual attacks. When he started these attacks, he was being supervised on licence by the Probation Service after having been released from prison.

An independent review into the McCann case looked at how probation staff consider recall - sending someone on licence back to prison if they have committed a further offence. The review found 8 occasions where staff considered recalling McCann but did not.

The review identified several areas for improvement. HMPPS decided to build a digital service to make the process of recall easier, aiming to give easy access to information and allow staff to record the rationale for their decisions.

Before the project began, probation practitioners were using various different systems to view information about people on probation. If they decided to recall someone, they had to fill in a long and complex form called a Part A. This form included the reasons why they wanted to recall the person, as well as details like the sentence, offence and level of risk.

The initial idea was that the new digital service would bring information about people on probation into one place. This way, staff would spend less time trying to find the information and more time thinking about their decision.

Over time and through user testing, the service evolved from a simple information dashboard into a system that allowed staff to fill in a digital version of the Part A and make the recall process easier.

When a probation practitioner considers recall but decides against it, the person on probation gets a letter explaining this. This is called a ‘decision not to recall’ letter (DNTR). It outlines what is expected of the person in the future. The CaR service also developed to allow practitioners to record decisions not to recall someone and write this letter.

Initial planning

The audit required a content designer with Whitehall Publisher experience to:

• immerse themselves into the digital communications team and understand all its workflows and processes

• review Whitehall Publisher data since 2015

• connect with the Government Digital Service (GDS) to understand its processes if there was a change in government

• review all communications about history mode from previous implementations

What they say about working with Scroll

“Scroll’s content design expertise was vital in helping to design a service that users said was easy to understand and made their jobs easier. Their content designers stand out for their focus on the user, expertise, and ability to collaborate successfully across multidisciplinary teams.”

Darius Pocha, Partner, Create Change

The solution

Working in a multi-disciplinary team, Scroll content designers: 

• worked with business analysts to understand business processes and pain points within the recall journey

• collaborated with the interaction designer and user researcher to develop design ideas and prototypes that were tested with users

• simplified the questions in the Part A to make them easier to understand, making the recall process easier and quicker

• presented information from 3 different systems in a clear, easy-to-understand format

• worked with subject matter experts to improve the DNTR letter, helping practitioners write better letters that were easier to understand

• designed a flow allowing people to record why they were thinking about recall in the first place - helping to ensure the rationale for decisions was defensible

How we worked

Scroll provided content design expertise to a multidisciplinary team that was put together by Create/Change. We provided: 

• a senior content designer for 2 years 

• a senior content designer for additional support during a 7-month period

Our content designers used Jira, Slack and Miro to collaborate with the rest of the team - and MOJ digital colleagues - during a project that was largely remote, with some in-person meetings. We developed designs and prototypes using Figma and the GOV.UK prototype kit. We worked with and adapted elements of the MOJ Design System to build the service. 

We took the project to a service assessment and passed. 

What we achieved

Starting with a private beta, we eventually rolled out CaR across HMPPS. User feedback was very positive. People said that the information and questions in the digital service were easy to understand and helped to make their jobs easier because they no longer had to access multiple systems. 

The team also identified sections of the Part A that could be auto-populated by the service, giving practitioners more time to focus on things that required more considered input. 

Working with a business analyst and interaction designer, our content designer also developed a way to hide some of the complexity in the Part A and only show practitioners the questions they needed to answer depending on what sort of sentence the person was on.