2018-11-02 00:00:00 +0000 - Chaeny Emanavin
Tl:dr - The CHHS Agency and departments analyze proposed bills to report on any impact the bills have on government services. Agency wanted a single system to review and approve the analysis workflows. The current solution is a home grown solutions provided by DSS technology department following sound agile processes. OI worked with Agency to establish a product management process so that the most important features for users get prioritized.
Team Members: David Kootstra, Joseph Lott, Jeremy Rabideau, Crystal Favareille, Janelle Graham, Marni Sager, Elizabeth Colegrove, Bhupinder Kaur
Office of Innovation Director: Chaeny Emanavin
Department Engagement Champion: Sarah Logue
CDSS developed the Legislative Analysis System (LAS) as an in-house technical solution for the tracking and workflow management of bills through the legislative analysis process. CHHS adopted LAS in 2017 as a technical solution for unifying the CHHS approach to the legislative analysis workflow at the multi-department level.
However, many departments perceived LAS to be deficient in meeting the specific needs of their highly particularistic approaches to in-house legislative analysis. The Office of Innovation was brought in to see what might be done to facilitate adoption of LAS across the Agency departments. The initial challenge statement was ‘How might we improve the user experience of LAS to encourage voluntary full adoption across all thirteen Agency departments?’.
During the first sprint, the OI team interviewed more than thirty legislative analysts, accounting for twelve of the thirteen Agency departments. We developed a journey map of the legislative analysis process, which we leveraged to identify common pain points of users working within LAS. We also created four personas, reflecting our findings of four categories of LAS users:
We invited LAS users from throughout the Agency to one of three workshops in separate locations, Natomas, Downtown or Rancho Cordova (cancelled due to DCSS availability), to make attendance easy for participants. We administered Unified Theory on the Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT is a powerful model to determine if people will use a technology or not) questionnaires to workshop participants to gauge their current impressions and satisfaction using LAS. Overall the team determined the nature of the challenge could be grouped into the following buckets: Data, Platform/UX, Process/Workflow, People Dynamics.
After discovery the challenge statement remained the same: How might we improve the user experience of LAS to encourage voluntary full adoption across all thirteen Agency departments?’
Users brainstormed and created multiple low-fidelity paper prototypes, focusing upon several areas: login experience, notification presentation, reports, and the overall look and feel of the site. The paper prototypes formed the basis of our higher-fidelity clickable prototype, created using the Marvel software tool. We did extensive user-experience testing with our clickable prototype, harvesting both user comments and reflections via empathic listening. Then, we re-administered the UTAUT survey to each user-experience testing participant. We compared the prototype UTAUT scores to the “as-is” results to determine how much we improved on the user needs identified earlier. We found significant usability improvements with the prototype.
Additionally, we were able to identify the use of CapitolTrack for reporting and bill tracking as a common thread across multiple departments. This led us to reach out to Capitol Track’s technical lead to explore the feasibility of standing up an API (Application/Program Interface) that would allow clean, cohesive and coherent feeding of Capitol Track’s bill information into LAS. Capitol Track updates their bill information every fifteen minutes. LAS presently uses the same data source, LegInfo, but only updates once per day. We helped the LAS developer team contact CapitolTrack and discuss needs for an API that will allow LAS to improve the quality and currency of the data it presents.
Finally, we helped define a subset of users: two departments who track large volumes of bills through each legislative season and have needs beyond most other departments. Identifiying and understanding the unique needs of these two high volume departments helps prioritize the product roadmap for LAS. Understanding the differing needs of heavy and light users of LAS provides key feature prioritization information needed to scale LAS into an Agency-wide technical solution.
The workshops led by the Innovation Team with many of our users helped jump-start our system redesign.
The benefit of working with the Innovation Team hasn’t been limited to concrete outcomes like prototypes. The longer-term benefit has been for the product owners and developers learning processes and tools, related to documenting user feedback, and road mapping based on priorities and workload, for example.
Conversations around categorizing what features our users want into delighters, performers, and must haves, now happen earlier in the process, which then helps us identify what can and should be accomplished in each release.