I am the interaction designer working on a service that aims to make it easier for users to apply for legal aid. The service allows a provider (a solicitor) to enter the applicants (the public) details, take them through a means assessment and a merits assessment, that informs the provider whether the applicant is eligible for legal aid.

I worked in a multi-disciplinary team where we worked in 2 week agile sprint cycles, I was involved in all stages of the design process from sprint planning - where we agree what we’re going to be working on in the sprint ahead, this is aligned to our sprint goals and product roadmap. We had daily stand ups where we gave updates on what we’re working on and any blockers. Once a week I gather with the user researcher and content designer and we do a show and tell update to our team - to get their feedback on design work, this is really good to ensure we’re meeting product/business needs, and that designs are technically feasible. We then present our work at a demo to our stakeholders. Then we do retros to refine our ways of working.

We are in private beta which means we are doing a mix of qualitative and quantitative user research on our user journeys and reviewing our analytics, making iterations to existing designs based on user feedback.

We recently ran an accessibility audit across our team to iron out any accessibility issues that we may have, using tools such as Axe and Wave, before we took this to the Digital Accessibility Centre.

I have also been working on the design of a new user journey which makes it quicker for the applicant to go through a means assessment using open banking, to extract their banking details. We released this, this week.

Here are a few screenshots from the service…

I am using the GOV.UK prototyping kit to create dynamic prototypes using HTML, CSS and Javascript to get user feedback on design recommendations.

https://apply-for-legal-aid-prototype.herokuapp.com/