Case study
Transforming digital learning for law enforcement through inclusive, user-centred design
Summary
The College of Policing needed to consolidate and modernise its digital ecosystem to better deliver on its mission to support everyone working in policing with professional knowledge and skills. It had a variety of inflexible, poorly integrated and inconsistent microsites not designed with accessibility or user needs in mind. CACI delivered a comprehensive discovery, UX and content design, prototyping and build programme that resulted in a single future-ready learning experience — guided by extensive user research, accessibility best practices, and alignment with Government Digital Service standards.
Company size
600+
Industry
Education
Challenge
The existing legacy platform was fragmented across inconsistent multiple microsites that weren’t meeting the needs of the College’s internal teams or external users and learners. The sites were difficult to update, with limited integration and poor content management capabilities.
The platform wasn’t designed for users with diverse needs and had accessibility gaps which meant it did not meet WCAG compliance and was not consistent with the inclusive design approach required by Home Office-led service assessments.
Both internal and external users struggled with fragmented experiences, confused content architecture and unclear user journeys that could not be measured properly causing confusion and low engagement with digital learning content.
Solution
CACI led a full discovery phase, engaging 180+ users including officers, trainers, and internal staff through in-depth interviews. This user research surfaced diverse needs and shaped a prioritised delivery roadmap. We mapped the user journeys of different learner types, co-created detailed personas, and audited the content, accessibility and usability of the existing sites.
Working in Agile sprints in continual collaboration with the College team, we designed a service blueprint and structured information architecture for a single learning platform built on Drupal CMS. This was validated multiple prototypes through usability testing and prioritised flexible learning pathways.
As a major content strategy and design project, we ultimately restructured, consolidated and migrated millions of words of content relating to police best practise and devised clear content strategy, workflows and governance that ensured the site could quickly deliver the correct, consistent up-to-date content – a key user painpoint.
We embedded inclusive human-centred design principles – ensuring alignment with Government Digital Service (GDS) and WCAG standards. To support this approach, we upskilled College of Policing team members across the organisation through training to ensure that once the consolidated platform was live, this inclusive approach could be maintained.
Results
This project demonstrates how user centred design and technology can be used for genuine digital transformation, changing what our clients do and how they do it. This was not just about implementing a new Drupal CMS from a technical perspective – we tailored the publishing experience to the operational needs of its College.
To help the College realise their goal of becoming the go-to resource for information, learning and research in policing, we then implemented a powerful Algolia search that was 200x faster and could integrate sources from multiple external sources and British police for websites.
This was delivered via a truly accessible, scalable Drupal platform with a robust content and SEO strategy that passed Government Digital Standards assessments first time and achieved a 100 Google Lighthouse score for performance, accessibility and SEO at launch and 96% in an independent accessibility audit score against WCAG 2.1 AA.
As a result, our work has touched every single department of the College of Policing in some way, from user journeys and content strategy, to DevOps support, to upskilling their internal teams and inspiring cultural change. Reflected in the feedback from the Home Office that said it was “great to see the CACI and College’s cross-functional team positively tackling such a vast organisational/cultural challenge”
