Information Request Service Redesign
Design Opportunity
Use a human-centered design approach to evaluate the current state, prototype, and implement solutions to improve an agency’s FOIA response user experience, employee experience, and business process.
Quick Facts
The Details
Role & Activities
I scoped, planned, and led research and design activities for discovery, design, and delivery phases of the project cycle including:
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Stakeholder interviews
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Contextual inquiry & interviews
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Design strategy workshops
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Research synthesis
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Service blueprinting
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Agile design planning
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Documentation and presentation of project plans, updates, and deliverables
As the senior interaction designer on this project, I led user research, ideation, client workshops, and design production. This included planning and leading 50+ stakeholder/user interview and contextual inquiry/observation sessions. I guided research synthesis and creation of current and future state service blueprints, and I oversaw prototype production and usability testing efforts of a four-person team.
Understanding the Current State
Working with our product owner on the agency side, I identified key stakeholders who oversaw or were responsible for each piece of the current state process. I built an understanding of the end to end process and roles through stakeholders interviews, and used the information to plan a design strategy workshop and field visits to conduct contextual inquiry, interviews, and observation. Over the course of several days, myself and a junior designer sat with employees, watching them perform their jobs and inquiring about challenges and workarounds in order to understand what pain points and opportunities we should address through our design work. We captured the current state findings in a service blueprint, a draft of which is shown in Image 2.
Defining the Future State
After we evaluated the experience across digital and physical touch points of the end-to-end process using interviews and contextual inquiry, I facilitated a visioning workshop where we developed design principles with stakeholders to guide the direction of the work (Image 3). Stakeholders also identified roadblocks to the work and brainstormed ideas to overcome them (Image 4). From the workshop and research, the team designed an “ideal future state” used to drive the creation of epics, features, user stories, wireframes, and prototype. We collaborated with a development team to implement designs in agile process.
Impact & Results
We developed feature concepts into wireframes and prototypes which were usability tested and revised. We then collaborated with a team of developers to turn the designs into an MVP which was implemented for a pilot group of users in May 2018, marking the first step in the agency’s transition to 100% digital processes. Our team's work contributed to the winning of additional contract work.
Image 1: Sketch note image of the guiding principles developed by strategy workshop participants (captured by a junior designer during the session).
Image 2: Our team mapped out the research from our field visit into a blueprint framework on the wall to help our stakeholders visualize the current process along with its pain points and design opportunities.
Image 3: Generating design principles during the workshop.
Image 4: Participants brainstormed blockers and organized them by smallest to largest to think through challenges and come up with ideas to address them during the workshop.
