Safer Sooner

Helping address New Zealand’s family harm crisis by creating a more holistic picture of family safety through design.

The NZ Police are using a community-led approach to develop a new case management platform. Digital Arts Network (DAN) worked on-site at Manukau Police Station, over four weeks, to observe the usage of the platform, identify its pain points, and understand how it intersected with the broader community.

MY ROLE
As a UX designer, I helped facilitate interviews and co-design workshops, synthesised UX research and took the lead on designing and prototyping a new concept for the integrated safety response platform.

The Context

In early 2019, Digital Arts Network (DAN) was chosen as one of three design groups to assist NZ Police in establishing a community-led approach to designing and building a new case management platform (ISR) to support a unified agency response to family harm.

The underlying goal behind this new approach is to provide safety assessment teams with a more holistic picture of the people involved in family violence episodes and connect these people with the best services available locally.

Despite its original intent, the new ISR platform proved to be unstable, unfit for purpose and difficult to use. Manual entry, unstructured content and disconnected data systems were constantly getting in the way of effective, safety planning. High case-loads also placed the Counties Manukau, Safety Assessment Team (SAM), under enormous time pressure.

Covering one of New Zealand’s largest districts, the SAM team respond to between 30 to 60 family harm episodes per day, every day of the year.

Providing a ‘snapshot’ of family safety

Family harm cases have to be processed, reviewed, amended for accuracy and referred within a critical period of 24 hours. Therefore, reducing the time spent completing administrative tasks and improving data visualisation became two key areas of focus for DAN’s redesign of the ISR platform.

In our prototype, a new dashboard page design displays recent task updates and episode information at a glance. New data visualisations were also explored as a way to facilitate more effective safety assessment meetings. Instead of trawling through long Police reports or strings of data, the new ‘people connected’ diagram immediately gives the SAM team a snapshot of the situation at hand.

Relevant people, family members and whanau are all displayed in the context of their risk, vulnerability and engagement with other agencies. Coloured ellipses are used to represent the make-up and associated risk of each family household. Other vulnerabilities such as pregnancy or disability also help the SAM team to prioritise specific cases and pair them with appropriate services.

Getting a broader picture of family safety

During the project, there were a number of crucial junctures where we chose to pivot our approach in order to carry out more comprehensive, validated user research. The first example of these pivots was the decision to engage with agencies who operated outside the context of Police and the current ISR initiative.

Not only did this help achieve a more even representation of needs, it also revealed a clearer picture of the safety planning journey as a whole. Talking with front-line staff helped us understand how the shortcomings of the ISR platform were affecting caseworkers and their ability to engage effectively with their clients. Even something as simple as changing our workshop location from the Central Police Station to the neighbouring centre for social work programs helped introduced new perspectives and broaden the discussion.

Agency coordinators, caseworkers and administration staff had the opportunity to share openly and freely about their day-to-day challenges and ongoing needs amongst their peers.

Another example of pivoting our design approach involved organising a series of collaborative feedback sessions (in place of more formal user testing) towards the end of the project. Despite only having short snippets of time with the SAM team due to their workload, we were able to identify a number of usability and content gaps that would have otherwise found their way into the final design.

Feedback from testing enabled us to make several critical changes, and as a result, provide our client with a more robust solution.

Discovering downstream effects of data quality

A key learning from engaging with external agencies was discovering the disparity of data accuracy between organisations. Caseworkers repeatedly expressed their frustrations with unreliable data and how this affected their ability to engage with the people they are assigned. Every year, thousands of hours are being wasted dialling the wrong number and turning up to the wrong address because the information given to caseworkers is out-of-date.

To address misinformation, agency-related data and safety plan updates were displayed more prominently and in more detail throughout the platform.

By highlighting when a person’s contact details were last updated and prompting Police to call people during the initial callout, the likelihood of gathering and distributing reliable data was improved. The new design also added a list of previously involved organisations wherever possible, enabling Police and admin staff to notify these organisations as soon as possible.

Moving towards more measurable outcomes

Another significant pain point for staff was the effort required to keep track of safety plan tasks and identifying whether or not they were proving to be effective.

Limitations of the ISR platform make it difficult for caseworkers to enter updates efficiently. With most agency workers having to update their own organisation’s legacy systems, and face-to-face interactions being a top priority, the task updates being entered by staff are often vague, unstructured and process-orientated. Furthermore, there is no easy way for workers to indicate how their actions are being responded to by the people they are trying to help.

To help address this, we explored a faster, more comprehensive way of managing and entering task updates. Adding simple inputs for basic information such as calls made or visits completed allowed caseworkers to spend more time describing the engagement in greater detail. The structure and consistency of the way this information is collected makes it easier to measure the effectiveness of family safety plans and change it accordingly when needed.

Conclusion

This project presented many challenges in a space that continues to be incredibly complex to navigate. It was a privilege to contribute to the Safer Sooner initiative which is helping address one of New Zealand’s most pressing social issues and helping keep our families and whanau safe.

We would like to thank the Counties Manukau Police, Friendship House and all others involved for their incredible support and generosity throughout this project.