UNISYS HOLMES2

HOLMES 2 (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System) is an information technology system that is predominantly used by UK police forces for the investigation of major incidents such as serial murders and high value frauds. It provides total compatibility and consistency between all the Police forces of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, as well as the Royal Military Police.

Objectives

The key objectives of this project were to:

• Improve the user experience on the HOLMES application.
• On future changes (such as making the application responsive).
• Have a pattern library or set of design guidelines that HOLMES technical team can use to make changes in the future, so you can maintain the new experience as the product evolves.
• Make it easier for users to learn how to use the application
• Create an evidence base for good/best practice.

My Role

Worked as User Experience Lead for upgrading Home Office Large Major Enquiry System (HOLMES) used by UK Police Forces to manage Criminal Investigations and respond to Major Incidents.

•  Conducted qualitative and quantitative research leading on the initial designs right up until test the final product all with real users, working with the business stakeholders to translate your research into user stories
• Produce user journeys, wireframes & prototypes
• Produce user interfaces for development including all interactions and states
• Work collaboratively with developers throughout the design and development process
• Work within agile delivery teams to produce and implement high-quality design concepts
• Partner with colleagues to ensure a consistent user experience across services, including designing reusable elements
• Build relationships and work effectively within an agile delivery model with a multidisciplinary team
• Deliver high-quality digital service designs that meet web standards and GDS/GOV.UK design principles, ensuring that compliance with accessibility standards is built into designs from the outset.
• Communicate credibly with a wide range of digital delivery disciplines internally and externally.
• Collaborate with creative, strategic planning and technical teams to ensure that the most appropriate user experience was created in order to meet user and business needs and exceeded expectations
  

What we’ve achieved so far

Our work so far has concentrated on understanding user needs and business requirements, designing and prototyping new features and pages, setting up the necessary technical environments in LIFERAY, a Digital Experience Platform.

Working closely with business stakeholders and users, we’ve established the foundation for what will be released publicly and 

Approach

Only if we have a full understanding of project needs, objectives, and any conditions and constraints that are operating on the development of the application can we can deliver with the full value.

With a number of user research activities followed by ideation and wireframing. This given U-LEAF information, insight and recommendations to drive immediate improvements, as well as information to guide and shape longer-term initiatives.

Services Delivered

• A background review of existing information
• Usability & accessibility testing
• Stakeholder requirements workshop
• User testing and interviews (telephonic & face-to-face)
• Creative, UX & interaction design
• Information Architecture
• Strategy workshops
• Ideation & Prototyping workshop
• Wireframes & Wireframe testing with selected user groups
• UX Pattern Library
• Tablet friendly front-end design, development & testing

Pragun Mehta
Founder & Director of OM IT Consultancy Ltd

I worked with Jojest at Unisys for almost 7 years. He is very creative and brings new ideas into the User Interface side of our Software Products. I found his approach is very professional. He is very hard working and passionate about his web designs. He is a brilliant team member and always ready to help teammates. I certainly recommend Jojest as a User Experience consultant for your business.

Bhanu Akkineni
Senior Java Developer/Designer at Unisys

Jojest and I worked together for more than 7 years at Unisys. As a UX lead, he was responsible for the overall user interface design and development of the software product. He prepared the user interface guidelines and made sure that they are implemented. He has excellent Javascript and CSS skills and is a go-to person for any UI related help. His UI/UX expertise has greatly helped the product which has many complex flows.

He has excellent interpersonal skills and was always helpful to other team members. I would highly recommend him for any UI/UX roles.

Research

Main findings from the interviews and ethnography
HOLMES users themselves provided feedback on their current devices, work-flows, day-to-day issues, and pressures and hoped-for improvements in the new design. Key among these were Recognised terminology and visual cues – there is a widely recognized informal taxonomy of terms used by staff and the application needed to reflect this rather than ‘system’ terminology. This was particularly critical for those who were new to their role.

Main findings from the expert evaluation and user testing
Several critical UX issues were identified from the expert evaluation and user testing, ethnographic study – these were incorporated into further iterations of wireframes

Key among these were:

• Unrecognised terminology and unclear labelling
• Poor iconography for key functions – both visibility and recognition/understanding were problematic
• Inconsistency of elements, labelling and functions across screens
• Counter-intuitive task-flows which did not match users’ expectation or current work patterns
• Poor affordance – the size of some clickable/ tappable areas was insufficient for quick and error-free use – especially one-handed

1st round testing of the prototype revealed the same critical issues as well as further issues in the flow of customer tasks and journeys.  These were addressed with wireframed/prototyped recommendations and fixes in two further iterations of the prototype. Re-testing showed measurable improvement in both quantitative measures (success rates and speed) and qualitative (comfort)

We tested the clickable prototype and visual design stills to explore

• how well users navigated the application and whether they were able to complete key journeys
• Users’ understanding and expectations of the content and functionality of the application
• User views of the visual design
• How users currently manage their day to day tasks, and whether participants would consider moving to new user experience after interacting with the prototype

We provided a range of recommendations and suggestions based on user feedback and observations during user-testing sessions. These involved simple content, form and layout changes as well as larger changes involving changed or added functionality to help HOLMES improve their application and allow them to match up with user needs.

Strategy

to discuss branding and visual identity in order to determine how this is best applied and created new designs for:
- Home/landing screen
- Personal data screen
- Core system navigation, buttons, widgets, and interactions
- Mobile/tablet views and other portable devices

We chose to deliver ‘flat’ designs which can be used by the HOLMES team and serve both as a precursor to the co-design workshop and as core project deliverables followed any adjustments made after the co-design workshop.

Through a number of workshops, we then discussed and agreed on KPIs and married business and end-user needs. The workshops allowed us to focus on the functionality, content, information architecture and ‘look and feel’ of the website.

Design

• Development of key tasks/user journeys across multiple user roles and three organisations – Dorset Police, Bedfordshire Police and Bedfordshire Police (a total of 21 separate tasks)
• Three rounds of formative User Testing of these tasks using iterated versions of the prototype and tested with representative staff from the three organisations.
• Very high fidelity interactive prototypes of the application based on wireframes
• Final in-depth report from the User Testing
• An updated ‘final’ prototype 
• Recommendations for refinements to the design and  functionality of the application
• New iconography that was more in line with users’ mental models and expectations
• Design guidelines

Challenges

We must design in a user-centered manner, for a wide range of user types, however, we did not have direct access to many user types and make the complex simple, providing a clear and intuitive interface for a system which is data heavy and highly customizable.

We have thus created a collaborative and flexible design approach which utilizes Unisys’ expertise in order to design with end users in mind, whilst ensuring technical feasibility.

Result

Users clearly saw their potential product experience through the lens of their desired role. This set the overall goal that pages should provide a broad overview of the full product experience

Since HOLMES UX Uplift went live, we have seen:

• Improved System Usability Scale (SUS) from 77 to 89
• 161% increase in the number of tasks completed during a period
• Pages per session and session duration averages both decreased by over 100%, suggesting faster completion of tasks like creating a Nominal, Wizard flow of registering a missing person, Register a document and workflows, Graphical Reading & Indexing process, etc.

© Jojest Thomson 2019  -  Forever