Child Welfare Information System
Overview
This story focuses on discovery and research for the understanding the users of the Child Welfare Information System from the State of Michigan for the Foster Care Licensing. Various documentation/presentations and designs were prepared so as to share the knowledge with the technical teams.
Technology: Salesforce
Visual Design: Provider Portal (Public)- State of Michigan Digital Guidelines and Worker Portal (Internal)- Salesforce Lightning Design System
Design Tools: Figma, Miro, Salesforce (Point and Click)
Team
4 User Experience Researchers + 1 User Experience Designer
My Role
I was the designer on the team, with following responsibilities-
- Attend user research sessions, bring in questions and take answers
- Brainstorm solutions with the UX Research team
- Bridge the technical gap for User Researchers
- Synthesize the insights and findings into documentation and share with technical leads, collaborating with the Business Analyst
- Design high-fidelity mockups and collaborate with front-end developers.
- Report to the Product Owner
Timeline
8 Months (September’21- April’22)
The Project
The entire project involved multiple user sets and portals linked and synced with each other to provide a seamless experience at each end. This involved user interactions, system automated processes, reminders, and notifications for ease of use.
User Sets
- Foster Care Providers/Caregivers (Michigan Residents)- applying and maintaining foster care license.
- Licensing Workers and Supervisors in Licensing Agencies- facilitating foster care licensing process.
- State Consultants and Supervisors (Michigan Department of Health and Human Services- Department of Child Welfare Licensing “MDHHS-DCWL”)- overseeing the licensing process and handling state related nuances.
- General Office Assistant- returning reports to DCWL about licensing from various licensing agencies.
- Foster Care Navigator- helping potential foster care providers navigate through the process and portal.
- Tribal Worker- working on the license of tribal population
- Recruitment & Retention- working on recruiting foster care providers
- Directors- overseeing the entire process
and more…
Objective
Project
A digital system supporting the foster care licensing in whole. To ease the arduous process, so that the workers can help foster care providers better, resulting in the comfort and happiness of foster kids.
High-level process:
- Potential foster care providers contacting agencies and applying for license
- Licensing agencies processing applications, conducting home-investigations and placing kids
- DCWL facilitating the process by providing approvals, keeping a check on the process throughout the state.
Research
The user research for the project was conducted in two phases-
Phase I: Discovery
Discovery phase helped understand the different user sets in terms of their work-style, responsibilities, priorities, skills, frustrations and basic life-style. Learning about the drawbacks of current practice which is on paper along with a 15+ years old portal.
23 in-depth, 90 minute discovery sessions with prospective/current foster care providers, licensing workers, DCWL consultants and supervisors.
As only designer, I attended each research session with 2 researchers (facilitator and note-taker)
As a team, we prepared a general script including high-level open questions for the users to feel comfortable and tell their stories. Following areas were touched during the sessions-
- Life story behind their current role
- User journey for licensing process
- Navigation and case management
- Training
- Responsibilities and time-breakdown
- Challenges in current practice
- Overlying needs
After each discovery session, the team would be meet again on the same day to share notes, discuss on insights and brainstorm solutions. Together, we prepared the documentations to be used for further development process.
Foster Care Provider Portal (Public)
This portal required greater deal of attention as it was to replace the on-paper process and was public facing for potential foster care providers.
10 in-depth 90 minutes user interviews were conducted to gather insights and learn about the users.
Worker Portal (Internal)
Along with detailed insight document for each user-set. Following documentations were shared with Technical Leads and Product Owner:
User Personas and Journey Maps:
Licensing Worker
Licensing Supervisor:
DCWL Consultants
DCWL Supervisor:
Other Personas:
Provider Portal (Public) Design:
- Clear Direction
- Action Oriented
- Respectful
- Dynamic Roadmap
- Informative
- Timely Reminders
Design Iterations: Various iteration were worked upon, making sure the each component on the screen was feasible, given the limited time and technical constraints.
Final Designs:
Worker Portal (Internal) Design: This used the out of box functionalities and design. And therefore, no major visual designs/prototypes were required. Rather the solution ideas were presented with Salesforce (Point and Click) to be shared with technical team and used for usability testing.
Phase II: Usability Testing and System Feedback
During this phase the design prototypes were tested with the users which were prepared on Figma and Salesforce platform. 60 minute qualitative usability testing sessions were conducted with same user groups, but with different individuals. Post each session, the team sat together to share insights and brainstorm. Finding out the following:
- Things working well
- Things not working well
- Things can be improved for this launch
- System constraints and training items
- Things that can be addressed in next launch.
Provider Portal (Public): Foster Care Providers were quite happy with the designs and functionalities. There were minor additions in FAQs and information at each step.
Worker Portal (Internal): The portal was tested for the copy, functionalities and the process flow. At every stage, it was good to confirm with the end users that the system behaved as they expected.
Functionalities were broken down and combination of user groups were called for the same session, so as to make sure the flow of data was correctly placed with the system.
Challenges
Following challenges were encountered while working on the project:
- Technical incapabilities: I did not have prior experience with salesforce. Initial months of the project were quite challenging as I there were a lot of technical details to grasp in.
- Users being used to bad old system: Since the old system did not automate the process, users were used to some manual wrong practices. Research sessions revealed such situations and quite a time was spent in learning and thus correcting users.
- Limited test data: Since the worker portal involved the flow of providers data from one hand to the other so as to process the license. It was hard to test the functionalities that required data involving special situations.
Learnings
The project provided a great deal of learning in the following areas-
- Bridging the technical gap
- Designing mockups using Salesforce (Point and Click)
- Child welfare licensing process
- State practices and rules
- New and easy ways of note-taking, sharing insights within the team
- Efficient brainstorming sessions
Conclusion
The project was an amazing success for me as a designer. It allowed me to work with cross-functional teams, collaborating and sharing ideas. The challenges brought in learning and so interaction with kind co-workers. I felt never alone and there was someone to help and guide at every stage.
This was a high-level story of a very complicated process.
Thanks for reading. Please comment or reach me for any feedback!
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