The business challenge

We were requested by a State’s Department of Justice to envision via a “portals” platform how users within the judicial system could interact in a transformative way with their existing and proposed digital and technology systems, and to deliver working prototypes that brought the vision to life.

The client approached Hypereal based on the success of our previous work for them. Their considerations included the quality, practicality, and originality of our solution, and our ability to work to a tight 10 week timeline.

The work

We mapped intersections between existing systems and transformation projects to surface the client’s true need, which was to picture how these separately conceived elements would fit together in a digital endstate.

We generated 3 alternatives from “mild” to “wild” to confirm the client’s change appetite, then worked in a highly compressed timeline to design, demonstrate, and quantify benefits of the “wild” approach.

Through workplace shadowing, we built a detailed understanding of the needs and challenges of the two most under-served user cohorts (one of which had previously been highly resistant to digitising their processes).

For a representative matter type, we developed a journey map that captured all manual and system interactions, and outlined all automation opportunities to reduce cycle time and increase process efficiency.

We then zeroed in to “on the day” court processes and built prototypes to demonstrate how Registrars and Judicial Decisionmakers would access, consult and use the platform to better understand, allocate and process workloads. Working with an in-house team, we verified that the design required no new functionality or interfaces to be successful.

The sustainable outcomes

• A narrative arc for the ‘Portal’ that shows how existing systems, transformation projects (and some additional ideas we suggested) will flow together into a digital endstate vision
• Contextualised by a fully worked example legal matter type from arrest to judgement
• A protoype ‘Portal’ for 2 of the 5 user cohorts
• A design pattern that easily scales to other matter types and court contexts with minimal adaption, and that will provide consistency as the platform grows
• User centred design approach resulting in “something of value” (the power of online archives) for previously highly resistant users
• Prototypes with low external system dependency, that will deliver substantial operational efficiencies for courts “on the day” and can be built now