Ministry of Justice: redesigning the national police reporting system

The challenge

Police officers across the UK relied on a legacy reporting system that was unsafe, inconsistent and hard to use. The stakes were high: this was a vital live government service that could never stop running, so the transition between old and new had to hold data safely while staying usable for officers. Every force had its own ways of working, stakeholders had given no clear direction, the delivery team didn't yet see the value of user research. And after poor onboarding experiences in the past, forces didn't trust us to build them a good service.

What I did

I took ownership of the research strategy from a standing start. I ran stakeholder workshops to define a vision for the service, aligned research goals to it, and created dedicated research playbacks and a continuous-improvement survey so progress was visible and measurable. I ran “How Might We” sessions to turn team assumptions into testable hypotheses and brought developers into research sessions so they heard officers first-hand.

To rebuild trust with forces, I implemented monthly user group sessions with live “pub quiz” style surveys, and conducted ethnographic field research, visiting forces around the country to understand their workflows and test prototypes in context. This uncovered laborious workarounds, data risks and trust gaps that no remote session would have surfaced. Alongside this I ran co-design workshops with Crazy 8s rapid prototyping, diary studies tracking real use across forces, and 1:1 interviews with prototype testing.

Results

• Security risks identified and mitigated quickly.
• 70% of users came to trust the new system over the old one.
• Secured additional project funding and time.
• Supported onboarding of 45+ police forces onto the platform.
• Contributed to reducing operational and security risks across 25 identified cases.
• Promoted to Senior as a direct result of this work.