A legal process, made human

Making a complex legal process navigable for the people going through it.

Scope

The Fitness to Practice directorate is the legal arm of the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC). This is the body responsible for regulating the standards of nurses, midwives, and nursing associates across the UK. It handles public complaints and proceedings that could potentially end a healthcare professional's career.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the NMC's Fitness to Practice backlog grew significantly. A task force was assembled to address it across multiple workstreams. I led the content and UX strand, focusing on a root cause that wasn't getting enough attention: the quality of referrals and the user’s understanding of the process.

The section of the website I inherited hadn't been updated for over five years. The result was content that was legally accurate but practically unusable as it was jargon-heavy, hard to navigate, and inaccessible to much of our audience.

People couldn't understand what to expect, couldn't complete the referral form without errors, and didn't trust that the process would work. That mistrust had a direct impact on the quality of submissions the NMC received and on the confidence of the nurses and midwives going through proceedings.

Process

The teams at the NMC were heavily siloed, with each part of the directorate focused on its own piece of the process. Before I could design anything, I needed to get those teams in a room together.

I led four discovery workshops with stakeholders across the directorate, deliberately mixing people who rarely worked together. The goal was to build a shared picture of the problems, not just from a content perspective, but from the perspective of caseworkers, legal teams, and the people who handled calls and complaints from the public.

These sessions surfaced insights that a content audit alone couldn't have found: the specific moments when people got lost, the questions they kept calling in to ask, and the language that consistently confused them.

I backed this up with a thorough content audit, web analytics, customer service data, audience surveys, and research from nursing and midwifery forums. These forums were places where healthcare professionals talked candidly about their experience of the process.

The picture that emerged was consistent across every source.

  • The content was written well above the average reading age, making it inaccessible to much of the public.

  • Legal jargon created confusion and distrust, particularly for registrants trying to understand their rights.

  • The referral form had significant barriers, including no way to save progress and several accessibility issues that prevented users from completing it.

  • There was no clear, visual explanation of what actually happened at each stage of the legal process. Most users had no way of knowing where they were or what would come next.

Solution

Plain language and tone

The most foundational change was a comprehensive rewrite into plain English. I worked closely with subject-matter experts to ensure every piece of content was legally accurate and genuinely understandable. Where technical language was unavoidable, I created a glossary that all legal content linked out to.

I replaced institutional language with the words our audiences actually used, such as "nurses and midwives" instead of "registrants" and "complaint" rather than "referral" in contexts where it better reflected what users were actually doing.

I restructured every page with clear headings, short paragraphs, and a consistent reading age target throughout.

Making the process visible

Nobody could see where they were in the legal process. I worked with our website engineer to design a new step-by-step template that mapped the full journey from initial complaint through to court proceedings, with each stage clearly labelled and detailing what it involved and when different people would be contacted.

This template became the backbone of the redesigned section. For the first time, users could orient themselves within the process rather than having to piece it together from separate pages of text.

Video content

Fitness to Practice proceedings carry real emotional weight. Reading dense legal content when you're anxious or frightened is exhausting and often ineffective.

I introduced a series of six short videos, each featuring a real member of NMC staff explaining their team's role, what their work involved, and when users would encounter them.

The aim was to make the process feel less anonymous and less intimidating and put real people behind a process that had previously felt like a faceless institution. Qualitative feedback later confirmed this was the change users remembered most.

Referral form redesign

The referral form was a major source of poor-quality submissions. Users were abandoning it mid-way through, or submitting incomplete referrals because the form made it too hard to do otherwise.

I redesigned the form experience with several targeted changes:

  • A save-and-return function that allows users to complete it across multiple sessions.

  • Improved placeholder text and error states that gave specific, actionable guidance.

  • Removed all optional questions (if a question wasn't needed to act on a complaint, it shouldn't be in the form at all).

  • Accessibility improvements throughout

SEO and accessibility

None of the Fitness to Practice content had been written with SEO or accessibility in mind. I worked systematically through the section to add metadata, alt text, and meta descriptions, and collaborated with the website engineer on technical improvements to page speed, site structure, and plug-in management.

Accessibility improvements went further: sidebar navigation linking to related content, "skip to content" functionality for screen readers, and a significantly reduced reading age across all pages.

Outcomes

  • Complaint quality improved by 32%, enabling caseworkers to open and close cases significantly faster.

  • Our pages’ bounce rate decreased by 18%.

  • Average time on Fitness to Practice pages increased by 2 minutes, suggesting users were finding and reading content rather than leaving immediately.

  • Qualitative feedback showed that nurses and midwives felt more supported throughout the process and were able to find answers to their questions independently, reducing pressure on the NMC's support teams.

Learnings

Introducing agile ways of working into a team that had previously operated in a traditional waterfall environment took more adjustment than I anticipated. Running a brief introduction to agile at the start of the project rather than learning as we went would have helped everyone hit their stride earlier.

Working within a larger improvement programme also meant limited visibility of what was happening in the other work streams. Managing scope and capacity was genuinely difficult at times.

In hindsight, I'd push for regular whole-programme reviews from the outset, not just for awareness but because the work streams had real dependencies on each other that only became apparent once work was already underway.