TLDR - Before we dive in, I'll draw a parallel to a more reknowned scenario - this will
help you understand the business challenge for this project. Think of online tax filing, you have physical paper forms
with many drawbacks - the biggest being delaying your returns (because, snail mail). Then you've got state tax-filing websites, which do not offer the best UX,
are slow and even errorneous at times. And then you've got the fluid, seamless, end-to-end online tax filing software like Turbotax and HR Block that makes your
tax filing and tracking stress-free.
Well, the client here, had a system similar to state tax-filing websites and I was tasked with building a new Turbotax-like experience for them. And guess what? - I was successful!
Folks at The Administration of Community Living (ACL), part of The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) were using a fractured, unintuitive grant submission system that peeved their users.
The system was non-preemptive, disjointed and inconsistent in many places which led to applicants' (grantees) and reviewers' (ACL staff) being out of sync and delayed the grant funding process.
As UX Architect at ICF Next, I had the opportunity to help ACL build a
grant submission and management system for Title VIA grant program that provides nutrition and supportive services
to Native Americans (American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian). We called this system OAAPS Older Americans Act Performance System.
The research phase involved attending a conference that walked us through the current process ACL had for grant management and its shortcomings. It also described ACL's vision for Title VI.
For next steps, I set up conf-calls with Regional Office, Central Office staff and Grantees the users of this system to understand their frustrations
from the current system and what their vision of the perfect system looks like.
We also asked questions that helped us understand these personas better what a day in the life of this person look like? how do they currently coorodinate with each other? and so on.
The personas shown above represent (left to right) Grantee/Tribal users (person receiving the grants),
the ACL Regional Office staff and ACL Central Office Staff (people reviewing the grants).
The challenge here is that most Grantee users are not too tech-savvy and use only basic software applications
Also, many reside in places with intermittent internet connectivity and we needed to build a system that accomodated for such users.
So here are the steps we took to address these user needs:
Minimizing the learning the curve for less-tech-savvy users
Making things consistent
While we started working on Title VI, my company had already rolled out submission systems for ACL's other titles - III and VII
and they were currently under development, so it was also about maintaining consistancy across all titles for design patterns, components, language, voice and tone.
We used the '5 whys' approach to understand the problem and learnt the root cause of the problem was not the tools nor the software, or even the way these people worked. It was the way the process was structured. Once this was validated through interviews, I immediately got working on remodeling the same.
My team followed a 3-week Agile SCRUM-based framework. We had daily stand-ups, weekly check-ins with the client, story point estimation meetings, weekly demos with the team and monthly sprint demos with the client. My responsibilites as a designer cum BA involved:
I did open and closed card sorting in the second round of participant feedback sessions to design the information architecture for the application we were planning to build.
Now that I had a new remodelled process in place that had been vetted, reviewed and fine-tuned by our clients, we could safely move to translating the process to a product workflow that would dictate the dynamics of the new application being designed.
I used Sketch, Axure and HTML/CSS for designing. The wireframes are protected under NDA. Let's get on a call to discuss this.
Grantees who have received funding from ACL in the previous year have to submit a Program Performance Report (PPR) that records information like served meals, number of trips, caregiver data as proof
of expenses and services provided through the grants. We had to start by first mapping the physical PPR to and online PPR.
This also meant employing adequate data validation and error handling to make sure the numbers that users would enter made sense.
The dashboards show where the user's application is in the process and who is working on it. They also reel in resources from ACL like important dates, system updates and grantee contact liaisons within the state. This was a common ask across interviews I did with the grantees.
ACL staff manage grantee and staff accounts. From interview feedback, I clearly sensed the need to integrate this functionality in ACL OAAPS's complete end-to-end grant submission experience. This feature enabled ACL staff to create new staff accounts, assign them to grantees, determine access privileges and establish relationships between them.
Designing for users in low connectivity areas:
Designing for users who are less tech-educated: