The Brief

To inform a redesign and development update, Islington Council engaged us to review their (much-unloved) internal Help Desk system, which is used by council staff to raise everything from software requests, to book time off, to handle public parking ticket requests and more.

A screenshot of a help desk interface, with overlaid annotations and sticky notes containing quotes from users.

A still from our report for Islington Council.

Our Solution

We undertook user interviews with internal staff as well as a heuristic markup of the key user journeys when submitting help desk tickets. 

Findings and recommendations from the research were grouped into key UX themes, covering everything from cognitive load on users and confusing user journeys, all the way down to the very language used on screen. 

Findings were matched with related usability principles, and presented with How Might We questions – simple creative prompts to help the Islington Council team come up with solutions for their challenges.

A slide from our UX review document, on the theme of 'Transparency of the system & its status'. It is broken into 3 sections of Raised Issues, Related Design Principles, and How Might We's.

A still from our report for Islington Council.