Making Humans Unavoidable
A CASE STUDY
My roles
Consultant
Human-centered design lead
Organizational designer
By the time the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) team got involved in the Electronic Immigration System (ELIS), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) had spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated approach for managing immigration. They had just one online form to show for their efforts; 94 other forms could still only be filed with paper.
ELIS development teams had transitioned from an entirely waterfall approach to a mashup of waterfall requirements-gathering and agile development ceremonies. It remained a system-centric approach that still largely ignored the experiences of the people who would have to depend on ELIS to do their jobs.
The system-centric release planning process followed before our pilot.
Solution: Put the needs of ELIS users at the center of development.
The pilot’s human-centered product development system.
After intense research of ELIS operations, I designed and led a human-centered product development system pilot that helped agile development teams better address implementation, usability, data and security issues. It added both designers and user research to the development process.
I introduced a high-level design system to help developers and designers improve ELIS’s effectiveness while expanding its functionality. The design system provided a consistent approach for crafting the experiences of ELIS users. It included visual and interaction style guides.
I managed the work of USDS UX professionals supporting the ELIS development teams as they participated in the human-centered product development system pilot.
Outcome
Results of the pilot were mixed. While falling short of full-scale adoption, the collaboration with directorate leadership at USCIS introduced user experience discovery to development. It provided a common language for the entire team for talking about the needs of ELIS users.
I was able to bring in a team of ten contract designers to an ELIS project that had never invested in design before. I led the proposal evaluation process and selected a vendor. I restructured development processes to optimize the impact of the new design team.