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My role: Service Designer

Client: Home Office (Public Sector)

Year: September 2024 - March 2025

Methods and tools: Process maps, Workshops, Mural

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I moved off the project before the pilot ran. This case study covers the design work up to that point.

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Summary

Overview

The Home Office wanted to reduce long waiting times in asylum decision-making.

The client had already chosen two interventions to test:

A questionnaire for people applying from within the UK (pilot): sent to people after screening. They answer in writing, and the answers help prepare a targeted interview.
Extended screening at Manston for new arrivals (proof of concept): more questions upfront, so decision makers can focus interviews on protection needs and decide faster.

What they lacked was a clear picture of how the interventions would fit alongside existing processes, teams and systems or how to test them before committing to large-scale change.

Role: Service Designer, working with business analysts, a user researcher and other consultants.

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Goal

Work out how both interventions could run inside the current operating model, meaning the processes, teams and data already in place, so they could be tested.

Understand how the asylum process works today, including the teams, procedures, data and handoffs.
Bring separate journeys and interventions together into one clear view.
Design how each intervention would run, using manual workarounds.
Agree how success would be measured.

Do all of this with no discovery phase, no technology changes and limited time.

Outcomes

One operating picture, not twelve journeys: 12+ journeys turned out to be one, changed by the interventions in different places.
Each intervention designed to run: I mapped the new process step by step and worked through the procedure changes with the teams affected.