COLORADO PEAK REDESIGN
Govt. & Public Services Industry
Key areas of work
UX Design foundation, design framework, wireframing, prototyping, design system
PEAK is an online service provided to the Coloradans to screen and apply for various medical, food, cash, and early childhood care programs.
As a Senior UX designer on the team, my responsibility was to create a robust design foundation and guide the team to create the optimal design solution for the client.
Team
Design Manager
UX Design Lead (Me)
Junior Designers (UX + VD)
Business Analyst
Tech team
Date
Mar 2020 - Feb 2021 (1year)
Company
Deloitte Consulting LLP
OVERVIEW
This is a Govt & public services (GPS) project for the state of Colorado. The citizens who fall under low-income brackets avail the Govt or the federal organization's benefits. The state of Colorado allows citizens to apply for these benefits and manage their accounts or case through a web application called Peak.
THE PROBLEM
Customer experience has become a core metric of performance. As a result, many government leaders have woken up to adopting it to deliver results. As a part of this wave, many state govt. agencies have been revisiting and looking at their current services not only to improve customer experience but also to meet their mission, manage budgets, and most importantly strengthen public trust.
The Colorado State Govt. was on a similar mission and during their service evaluation, they have identified various issues with the current PEAK application. From inconsistent design patterns to overwhelming information thrown in the face of citizens, leading to trust issues and usability challenges. Furthermore, it has led to case backlogs and huge traffic of calls to the caseworkers at the county offices. Making it difficult for caseworkers to maintain cases leading citizens to lose their benefits.
THE ASK
How do we gain citizens' trust and help them navigate through their life with the state-issued benefits?
How would we create a simple and reliable experience for citizens to use PEAK?
RESEARCH INSIGHTS
Denver studio UX researchers were at the forefront to conduct user research and share the insights with our team. Following are the insights they gathered through a mix of user surveys and phone call interviews.
Technology Access & Comfort
95%
have access to technology
90%
comfortable using technology
PEAK Usage
64%
use PEAK website to apply for current benefits
43%
of citizens use PEAK to find out what benefits they qualify for
39%
use PEAK website 6+ times per year
3636
Total survey responses
60
of 64 counties represented
PEAK
Experience
63%
do not fully trust PEAK to accurately & reliably determine their benefits
76%
of citizens prefer to use a digital channel to complete all actions
47.8%
of citizens have called/visited in-person for PEAK support
There were 7 archetypes of persona identified.
MY WORK & RESPONSIBILITIES
DESIGN FOUNDATION
Research shows that customer experience delivers a measurable impact for any industry, in our case it was Govt. & Public services. Furthermore, research also reveals that Govt. customers are 9x more likely to trust a Govt. service if they are satisfied with the service.
Satisfaction comes from improving their overall experience by making service interactions easy, providing the right information, and setting expectations. In addition, global research shows that simplicity & reliability tend to matter the most across experiential drivers of service satisfaction.
Hence the question arises what are the key factors we should address while designing for trust? Looking at various design solutions across the industry I identified the eight foundation points of design for trust which became the guiding light for the design team.
DESIGN IDEATION
The ideation process using the design for trust drivers
After establishing the foundations for our design, we categorized the four primary user flows into two types of journeys, learn journey and apply journey. These journeys dealt with confidential data and complex business processes requiring citizens to provide a vast set of information.
Hence we wanted to express how the design for trust drivers performed on other platforms dealing with complicated journeys and confidential data.
Study Excerpt
The study was intended to showcase examples from other platforms where design for trust was at play. Then, finally, we tied it back to design for trust drivers.
Study Excerpt
The study also provided us insight into an overarching framework that is used for simplifying complex form-filling processes. The 3A framework led us to simplify our form flows. Using the 3A frameworks as well as the Design for trust drivers we could develop several great ideas through sketches.
Framework
USER FLOW & WIREFRAMES
Creating userflow to simply the current form filling process
As we had identified the framework and wanted to structure the complex form filling process it was important to create a user flow. Below is the user flow I created for Report My Changes one of the most complex and highlighted journeys by the users during the research.
User Flow
Creating the user flow helped me to showcase the new structure and flow any user would experience as per their individual needs. This activity also served another important factor about the form filling which was determining the sequence of questions and where the users would need help or guidance.
Identifying these important factors we created our form design structure ' One thing per page' , 'Nested view', 'Progressive view'. This structure aided to simplify and provide relevance as to how and why users need to share their information.
Finally, the low-fidelity wireframes were created to show how the future experience would pan out to be. Here's a snapshot of a few screens of the Report My Changes flow which I had worked on.
IMPACT
User testing of these designs showed that 82% of citizens could complete their tasks without any help. Furthermore we created a design system for PEAK that the dev team and the future maintenance team could use for guidance. Click here to view the live website.