Helping the Home Office build digital tools for the caseworkers resettling Syrian refugees in the UK.
At a glance
Client
UK Home Office - Syrian refugee resettlement
My role
Design Lead on a Government Digital Service team in the Home Office
Users
Caseworkers, local authorities, charity groups
The work
Process mapping · user research · early prototypes for the resettlement programme
A real artifact of the process: housing addresses, passed around on a Post-it.
The situation
A national effort, run on Excel and Post-its.
When the UK committed to resettling refugees from Syria, the volume overwhelmed the existing process almost immediately. Cases, housing pledges and funding were tracked in spreadsheets and handwritten notes.
The anticipated process for the regional match-making model, mapped wall-size.
Mapping the process
Every decision maker described a different process.
Mapping the journey made the gaps visible: the process on the ground versus the one everyone imagined. The blueprint had senior stakeholders asking, for the first time, is that really how this works, and why are we doing it that way?
Mapping activities and pain points with the people running the process.
The research
Built with the people doing the work.
Workshops, interviews and watching caseworkers, local authorities and charities at work. The people who line up pledges, match cases and receive families, to learn what they actually struggle with day to day.
Opportunity worksheets: “…I would have a tool that could help me…”
From findings to opportunities
Pain points became a backlog of tools.
Each mapped pain point was turned into a concrete opportunity with the teams - what to automate, what to support, what to leave alone.
The Syrian refugee resettlement service - in alpha, on GOV.UK rails.
Early prototypes
From paper worksheets to a working alpha.
The research fed straight into early digital prototypes for the resettlement service - built on GOV.UK patterns and tested with the caseworkers who'd use them.
Where it landed
Tools for the people helping people settle.
The mapping gave the programme a shared picture of its own process; the prototypes became the basis for digital tools the caseworkers actually used.
It shipped as a live service on GOV.UK, part of the Government Digital Service - used by caseworkers to resettle Syrian refugees, and to make that work faster and less error-prone.
Looking back
What stays with me
It is rare to design something this consequential - a live service for families arriving with almost nothing - and that stays with you. So does the lesson: never assume you know how a process really works. Map what people actually do, and pay closest attention to where they do something you didn't expect.
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