Good design belongs to everyone
At Fjord, you can frequently hear us talk about terms such as Liquid Expectations and Living Services. A very short description could go…
At Fjord, you can frequently hear us talk about terms such as Liquid Expectations and Living Services. A very short description could go along the lines of:
“You know when you have a really easy customer experience with, say, a service like Uber that let’s you hop in and out of a taxi without having to handle money or wait to pay with your card? Or when your phone pings you on your way to the pub to let you know that by the time you get there it’s going to be closed? You begin to think of these kinds of experiences as the standard to which you hold all other brands. Your expectations aren’t limited by industry, and as better design across industries is technically possible today, it’s hard to understand why it doesn’t meet you everywhere you go.”
West Midlands Police (WMP) approached us a little over a year ago to help them become the public service that its citizens expect and deserve. As the second largest police district in England (first being Metropolitan Police), WMP wanted to move from simply reassuring the public to serving its citizens in need. Our task was to find the points of contact that most needed re-thinking, map frustrations (leading to opportunities) and design a digital service replacing their existing touchpoints. A complete re-design of the WMP website was needed to serve better.
Fast forward a few months: we’ve spoken to dozens of stakeholders, analysed thousands of customer calls and run workshops to consolidate a strategy. What made all of it digestible and less overwhelming was data visualisation. Combining the quantitative data into the assumptions made off the qualitative data begun to literally show us patterns, spikes and gaping holes.
What we found out was that people were calling the police for a multitude of reasons, or not calling for reasons that seemed to stem from mistrust or vulnerability. Options to use self-service was nonexistent, leading to a phone line bottleneck that would decrease the quality of time and attention given to cases that really needed it. Together with the force, we begun to implement a strategy of four key concepts, all of which would transform the existing digital offering.
Building a Visual Language
When your audience covers everyone and your duty is to service all, Accessible Design Principles become vital for all visual and interaction design.
Visual language is like any other language — if it’s not truly understood, then even small subtleties can mislead and add to confusion. Our goal was to design a living design system for fast building and better user experience — our first question always being ‘is it easy to understand’ and ‘is it simple to use’? We begun by designing the Homepage, which would be divided into two modes — a servicing mode and a browsing mode. This was a significant change in the way of thinking for the stakeholders and helped us prioritise users that most needed easy access to information and self-serve at any given point.
Once we had the homepage at it’s first approved stage, we knew more about our content and the users’ need for visual differentiation between sections. Too much consistency can actually be a bad thing — we wanted users to be able to go back and forth different modes and actions without getting confused as to where they were. A new brand palette was used to guide better, whilst use of imagery would be limited to features such as news articles and people information.
I could write a whole, new blog post about typography within this project but I think I’ll save that for the type geeks — we knew that type was the single most important visual element to get right.
We tested different font combinations for best readability and versatility. We wanted to create limitations so that anyone editing the code would have no problem replicating the hierarchy and spacing rules, but we didn’t want the outcome to seem governmental or one lacking the WMP personality. Once the groundwork of type, grids and colour was done, other parts were be easy to play with.
Ready to be released
The service is now ready for all users — iterations will and always should be worked on, and it will be interesting to see how people respond to the new role of the police.
The brand goal was to gain better trust by being more open and transparent.
The service goal was to give better support and guidance with easy and understandable tools and language, as well as give better confidence for all transactional needs.
The service personnel are no longer the only point of contact for matters that can now be self-served by the user and solved online — this will relieve the support lines and change the landscape of the employee’s role to one of an expert and moderator.
It was amazing to see how our conversations with the police begun to use language that’s common for a design practice but previously unknown for them.