Improving notices

If the primary way the public interacts with government is forms, the second most important channel is surely form letters. For a major government agency, I led a team of user researchers and service designers in a project to improve communication with program applicants.

Identifying opportunity areas and creating a roadmap

I was given wide latitude to scope this project. Through my team’s research and a site visit I conducted, I identified four broad opportunity areas. I then led stakeholders in an alignment workshop to tease out the impact and effort of each. The result in consensus and stakeholder buy-in. Our focus area was “communicating with applicants”, starting with notices, the letters and emails customers receive from the agency throughout their application process.

Next, I put together a discovery roadmap to help us understand the problem space and narrow in on an intervention. My goal was to fully understand the user experience of notices through qualitative and quantitative data, and find opportunities to address the issue. I planned out a schedule of stakeholder and user interviews, a project to identify, catalog and map notices, an audit of all notices, and eventually an insights report and pilot. Working with the PM, I created a flexible work plan that would keep us accountable to our partner, while allow us to pivot in response to research findings.

Interviews with applicants soon confirmed that there was a lot to be improved about notices. We were able to share that research with our partner, to help them fully understand the impact of poor customer communication. 

Partner quote:

"I listened into one of those [interviews with applicants] and other members from our team did too. I think those were very informative exercises, and if in the future we can do more customer interactions like that, I think it can only benefit us to understand how they are experiencing the process. So I really felt that was particularly powerful.”    

Piloting a better experience

Bureaucratic organizations tend to move slowly, and a consulting model can favor reports over action. Therefore it was extremely important to me to find a way to deliver real, measurable value to applicants, quickly. I identified a department who was eager to work with us, and who owned the infrastructure to make changes to their notices without having to go through IT. Working with my team, we identified a high impact notice to redesign. This email contained important instructions for the application process, but applicants found it confusing and repeatedly made errors. 

Working with subject matter experts from our partner agency, my team ran a plain language workshop to redesign this email into a simple, accurate, and actionable notice. We then designed an experiment to evaluate whether the email would result in more accurate applications, fewer rejections, faster processing time, and require fewer staff follow ups.  

Partner quote:

“I just wanted to comment that even the workshops that we've done together in collaboration have been excellent, because it's already had an impact on me and my team. I was looking at an unrelated letter that [our department] sends out earlier this week, and already my mind was looking at things. Like, we say more about what not to do than what we actually expect the customer to do. It's already made such a difference, and we'll be using that lens to look at our language in the future. These were great exercises, and I really appreciate the feedback you provided.”

Outcomes and next steps

Due to changes in the new administration’s priorities, my team needed to rotate off the project before the launch of the pilot. But because I had brought our agency partners along every step of the project, we were able to fully transition the pilot to them to run on their own. They are optimistic about the outcome, and looking forward to redesigning more notices in the future.   

Partner quote:

“I know our team has really enjoyed working with your group and you know we may even sort of understand Figjam at this point! It’s really been a pleasure. Your group has been so professional and organized and really asking great questions and dedicated to this. We are trying to move forward with [the pilot you helped us design]. We think it’s a huge improvement and we’re hoping that we can leverage that learning and apply it to our other [materials] that we discussed when you [visited us in-person]. [...] Thank you guys so much.”