JD Wetherspoon audited more than 800 pubs using spreadsheets and a third-party system nobody in the company could change. This replaced both. Head office writes the audits in a web console; area managers run them on an iPhone in the pub.

The problem was timing. Compliance standards change faster than a development cycle. Changing a question, a score or a follow-up rule meant raising a ticket, waiting for a sprint, and waiting again for a release. So teams kept their own spreadsheets alongside the official system, and the standard drifted between the two.

I ran persona research across seven roles, from the Head of Compliance down to the pub manager being audited, and mapped permissions across six role groups, including what happens when a record changes state. The two surfaces have almost nothing in common. One is a desktop tool used carefully at a desk. The other is a native iOS app used standing up, one-handed, in a working pub, often with no signal.

The design work that mattered was an authoring tool rather than a set of screens. Someone at head office pulls questions from a shared bank, sets the score for each possible answer, and adds follow-up questions that only appear when a specific answer is given. They preview the whole questionnaire before it goes live. When they publish a new version, the old one stays attached to the audits that already used it.

That last part had a consequence people argued about. A submitted audit locks its score, so changing a threshold later cannot rescore work already done. Finance asked for retrospective rescoring and did not get it, because an audit that can be rescored after the fact is not evidence of anything.

Changing a questionnaire went from a development cycle to an afternoon. One audit type took three hours to complete before this work; nobody measured it afterwards.