📌 01. Project Background

What is STEP?

A semester-long project that was completed with a real-life client, STEP. The client is a nonprofit organization for those with disabilities in Wayne County. We collected user interviews, organization data, research, and organization interface to deliver recommendations in interface design, organization structure, and referral processes.

🚀 02. The Challenge

🔎 03. Generative Research

Understanding STEP staff and their participants

a) Background Research

In order to offer complete contextual inquiry, I had to first delve deep into the context of STEP. After all, understanding the environment is the first step (see what I did there) to what to expect and how to act accordingly in a different culture, workspace, and mindset.

Key Questions:

1. What is Community-based Rehabilitation?

2. How can attitude change/affect inclusivity?

💡Key Takeaways:

b) User Interviews

The team conducted six virtual interviews that spanned the job roles of support coordinators, three managers from different programs, and directors. Each interview lasted from 60 to 90 minutes to ensure well-rounded data interpretation.

Key Questions:

1. What is the internal referral system?

2. Which role(s) play in the internal referral process?

3. What tools are used during the internal referral process?

💡Key Takeaways:

👤 04. Persona

Bringing to light our main role

Support Coordinators (SC) manage participants and start internal referrals

Managers oversee programs and approve internal referrals

Directors oversee multiple programs and aren’t supposed to be involved with internal referrals

💻 05. Observational Study

Getting a closer look at the software

We conducted an observational interview with a support coordinator on their platform, ASCEND.

Additional Features:

ASCEND beginning semblance of a task management system. As per other interviews, none of the other staff knew it was a feature or did not use the feature because it required a manual plugin for every participant and every action. They preferred using third-party platforms such as excel to keep track of participant data. Using a third-party application posed an issue as was a breach of confidential data as ASCEND was made to secure patient data.

💡Key Takeaways:

1. When the user adds a To-Do item, ASCEND shows current work and documents to sign.

2. Users can click Staff To-Do List and search a To-Do by case number or participant name.

3. The “Add to-do list” button was obscured within a line that took users to another page. They could not see what they already plugged in, relying on short-term memory. This takes a lot of mental loads to keep track of their To-Do List.

Accessibility Design:

• Small font, small buttons

• Lack of color contrast

• Information Architecture is confusing

🧠 06. Team Workshop

How Might We…

Now that the main role has been brought to light, the project was ready to be synthesized and funneled into recommendations for the client. We had a team workshop to collect our insights and laid out our How Might We.

🖇 07. Process Workflow

Unraveling the internal referral process

After our HMW team workshop, I created a process workflow chart to provide a visual view of the current internal referral process.

Process Workflow

💡Four issues with the current workflow:

⭐ 08. Recommendation(s)

a) Automated Ticketing System

As ASCEND already offered the beginning semblance of a ticketing system, the most feasible recommendation we could offer to STEP was to evolve their current To-Do List feature to an automated ticketing system. With the new recommendation, I created a new workflow with the new To-Do System.

New Process Workflow:

💡Four issues solved:

b) Usability Testing

STEP meets monthly with the creators of ASCEND for feedback on the program. Only Directors attend the meetings, so a lot of the feedback is delivered by ear.

We recommended Support Coordinators record themselves using the Think-Aloud Method where one speaks out loud as they’re completing a task. These questions will help the partner company understand the support coordinator workflow and be able to apply a better user experience for them. For gathering informative analysis from user testing, pain points need to be solved first. 

From the feedback provided to ASCEND creators, features have been added to ASCEND. The more components/features that are added, the more misleading a platform will become. More features do not necessarily solve problems; the more options, the more problems. With this recommendation, Support Coordinators are not burdened with more tasks or meetings.

🔜 09. Next Steps

In our final presentation with clients, there was a dialogue of our recommendation implementation in the future. From this, we will be able to…

1. Conduct further user interviews in success criteria and satisfaction.

2. Delve further into the design of ASCEND.

3. Implement a more detailed design recommendation for ASCEND.

💭 10. Conclusion

Reflecting on constraints

Issues we faced

• Time Management was huge during this project. As we were all students with heavy schedules, I’m proud of what we were able to accomplish together.

Reflections

• Quantitative data. As we were focused on quanlitative data, we were not able to funnel much of our findings into confident quantitative data points. User interviews were our biggest evidence, but sometimes users are blind to the real problems.

• More data. Looking back, we should have provided more evidence of ASCEND’s design such as using eye-tracking heat maps.