Situational Awareness Hub

Cabinet Office

Role

I was the Interaction Designer in a small multidisciplinary team, working alongside: Delivery Manager, User Researcher, and Content Designer, 2 developers.

From conception to launch, I was involved in every stage.

Platform

Web and mobile platform

Duration

August 2022 - August 2023

Challenge

The Joint Data and Analysis Centre (JDAC) needed a centralised hub for crisis management and situational awareness. The existing system (the COVID-19 Crisis Dashboard) was built rapidly, resulting in major usability issues:

Limited scope – it needed to serve more than just COVID data
Poor content discoverability – finding relevant data was difficult
Outdated UI – described as looking like “Windows 98”
Inefficient admin tools – content publishing was slow and prone to breaking

Primary users included:

Analysts & policymakers needing quick access to data for decision-making
Ministerial briefers preparing reports for government responses
Crisis responders coordinating across departments

The Solution – Situational Awareness Hub

I helped design a modern, intuitive platform that allowed end users to:

✔ Quickly find the latest crisis data and analysis

✔ View related content together for a complete picture

✔ Seamlessly share insights across government

✔ Generate briefing packs efficiently with downloadable assets

For Admins, I improved the content publishing process: 

✔ Faster and more reliable data uploads 

✔ Flexible formatting for reports and presentations 

✔ Reduced tech debt and improved system stability

UX process

Understanding user needs and painpoints through research

The user researcher conducted 60 user interviews and 2 surveys and we identified key needs.

End users (Analysts, Policymakers, Cabinet Office):

Needed better search and navigation
Wanted to see multiple data types together
Struggled with information overload

Admins users (Analysts uploading data):

Publishing was slow, complex, and unreliable
Downloadable assets were hard to extract and format for reports
System instability made updates risky

Restructuring content

I designed a new navigation and content structure to improve browsing and searching. Content was reorganised to be based on the National Risk register.

Creating journey maps, wireframes and interactive prototypes

Using Figma, I designed user journeys and wireframes for both content consumers and admins, utilising the GDS design system.

Creating interactive prototypes for testing the process journeys as well as identifying all of the states within the flows.

I learned that linking designs to Jira tickets helped the team with project management

Each design phase involved iterative testing to ensure our design decisions were evidence-based.

Stakeholder workshops to define the Vision

I led vision workshops with the Senior Leadership Team, facilitating ideation and prioritisation activities using Mural. This helped to align stakeholders and we produced a clear product statement.

Once we had a high level view of requirements we broke them down to form next steps for UX activities and a product planning roadmap.

New ways to navigate and search

I introduced multi-layer navigation patterns to satisfy depth of research whilst retaining user orientation.
Topics were associated with tags to enable content to sit in multiple places to increase discoverability

We explored and user tested different navigation patterns. The tabbed submenu performed better as users were able to see the topics without scrolling down, which was a problem especially on mobile.

Crisis management was an important section for the organisation that was previously hidden within the legacy system menu as a label. I redesigned the architecture to have it as its own topic in the main menu and tag to so crisis respond users could access relevant information straight away during a crisis.

Users wanted to view different content types together and I explored and user tested checkboxes verses second layer of tabs at the top. tested better with users and it didn’t compromise on space for viewing charts.

Admin journeys - Iteratively testing and designing

We regularly tested admin journeys with admin users to refine the designs and found that we were constantly learning about their workflow and requirements