Case studies
Aligning C+CO
Collaborative human-centered design activities work for everybody, even HCD professionals.
A CASE STUDY
My role
Silos in the federal government are insidious, even for the people charged with knocking them down. CX professionals, who often have to remove (or at least reduce) procedural and cultural barriers in order to get organizations to re-center around the needs of customers, can be victims of their own stovepiping.
When DHS’s Office of the Chief Information Officer established its Customer Experience Directorate (CXD) in 2023, the lines of work that separated its divisions were not well defined. By the time I joined the Capacity and Capability Operations Division (C+CO) a couple of years later, people were largely working in isolation. Teams-of-one were common and collaboration between the divisions was limited.
As a result, efforts and activities across CXD, and within C+CO, overlapped haphazardly. This led to inefficiency, frustration and tension.
Solution: Let’s draw a picture together
A model developed collaboratively by the Capacity and Capability Operations Division.
When I started as a branch chief, I treated my onboarding like it was a project and I interviewed my new CXD teammates like they were project stakeholders. I heard about many efforts underway that were similar, but disconnected. I heard complaints about teammates and leadership. I felt the tension of things gone unsaid and sensed the emotional scar tissue that had built up quickly in the directorate’s short existence.
My process to explore and address these issues:
Active listening: I talked to CXD staff, my fellow branch chiefs and CXD’s directors, collecting data without judgement or analysis.
Analysis: Once I had what felt like a critical mass of information, I looked for emerging themes and started playing around with the idea of an operating model for the work of C+CO. (What I really wanted to do was to collaborate with the directors and branch chiefs to come up with a CXD operating model, but as a new person stepping into a contentious environment, I didn’t see a path where that would have been successful.)
Iteration
Hypothesis: I sketched an initial version of a potential operating model. I tried to leverage words and concepts common to CXD, without being bound by them. (I tried to keep in mind that quote attributed to Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”)
Collaboration: As soon as I had the first lines on a screen, I started to bounce the model off some of the same folks I had interviewed earlier, both one-on-one and in small groups. The model got better with each review and revision. It’s a process that’s worked well for me over the years in a wide variety of organizations. Rather than using a visual artifact to sell one of my ideas, I use drawing as a common way for different people to talk about the same concept.
Distribution: We iterated on the model until I had the full buy-in of my fellow C+CO team members. Then I walked through it with the CXD branch chiefs outside of my division. Then I shared it during any conversation within CXD where it seemed relevant. (Heck, if I thought anybody would wear them to work, I would have silk-screened the diagram onto t-shirts.)
Impact
By the end of this process, folks in C+CO were talking about themselves as members of a team rather than as individual contributors. They seemed to better understand each other’s work, which led to more collaboration. The model gave us a way to evaluate incoming and potential work.
Maturing CX Capabilities at the Department of Labor
The Department of Labor’s workers compensation programs were very customer-oriented, but lacked the tools for collecting or analyzing their customers’ needs.
A CASE STUDY
My roles
Business development
Consultant
Researcher
Workstream lead
The Department of Labor asked Centers of Excellence (CoE) to help the Office of Workers' Compensation Programs (OWCP) improve the experiences of their many customers. I designed an engagement with three OWCP programs:
The Federal Employees’ Compensation Act (FECA) program serves injured or ill federal employees. Beneficiaries of the program are Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, postal workers, office workers, emergency responders, forest rangers, air traffic controllers, firefighters, Capitol police officers, and many others.
The Black Lung program supports coal miners, construction workers, and transportation workers who are regularly exposed to respirable coal mine dust and who have black lung disease.
The Energy program serves current and former nuclear weapons workers who have been exposed to radiation or other toxic substances.
I led the team that interviewed program staff and leaders to better understand the programs’ services and talked to the customers who rely on program services. The team evaluated programs based on the CoE CX Maturity Model. (I designed the model to define capabilities based on core CX functions.)
The three programs have made progress in measurement capabilities, tracking customer satisfaction and collecting performance-based metrics for timeliness, but overall, they lack human-centered design and customer experience expertise. Collecting, analyzing and widely distributing customer-related data is also an area of potential growth.
Outcome
We collaborated with staff and leadership to develop strategies and tactics for getting each of the programs to the next level in the CX Maturity Model. Four primary strategies emerged:
Share CX expertise across OWCP programs
Share tools across OWCP programs
Search engine optimization
Help the programs with their own strategies and tactics
Reimagining Workforce Services for the Department of Labor
The Department of Labor brought CoE in to research the Employment and Training Administration and make recommendations for improving their service delivery.
A CASE STUDY
My roles
Consultant
Usability expert
Workstream lead
COVID-19 killed more than a half million people in the U.S. by early 2021. Over 29 million had tested positive and the global pandemic triggered an economic recession. In response, the U.S. Congress passed the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus bill to speed up the country's recovery.
The Department of Labor (DOL) is responsible for the well being of U.S. wage earners and job seekers. The agency’s chief innovation officer wanted the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) to improve service delivery to the nation’s workforce. He reached out to GSA’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS) for help.
Solution: Research ETA customer needs and recommend foundational strategies and tactics.
I led the team that researched one of ETA’s longest standing digital tools, the CareerOneStop website. We collaborated with ETA leadership to transform findings into initiatives for improving the experiences of CareerOneStop customers and transforming how ETA provides its services.
My team’s activities included:
Heuristic evaluation
Usability testing
Web traffic analysis
Customer interviews
American Job Center visits
Outcome
Our primary recommendations:
Create key performance indicators (KPIs) that track the experiences of customers
Establish a customer research practice
Adopt a product development approach
Build continuous improvement capabilities instead of launching a redesign
Modernizing procurement
OPM needed an innovative approach for contracting development projects and they needed it in a hurry.
A CASE STUDY
My roles
Consultant
Workstream lead
2.5 million federal retirees and survivors depend on Office of Personnel Management’s Retirement Services to administer their benefits. Legal Administrative Specialists (LAS) adjudicated cases using the
FACES desktop app to determine benefits. For most cases, an LAS hand-entered information about the retiring federal employee based on paper records organized in a physical case file. The adjudication system depended on the LAS’s expert knowledge of retirement regulations and policies.
Both the FACES app and the “engine” that calculated benefits relied on technology that was no longer supported by manufacturers.
Solution: Jump-start OPM’s ability to contract and run modern design and development projects
I collaborated with stakeholders at all levels of OPM’s OCIO and Retirement Services division to craft two multi-million dollar procurements. I led both acquisitions, writing work statements, leading the proposal evaluation process and selecting vendors. I introduced a human-centered approach for both the creation of a calculation service and the replacement of the tool used to adjudicate the benefits for all retired federal employees. I managed the project teams and their managers and communicated with OPM stakeholders throughout the projects.
Outcome
We followed an approach for replacing LAS’s adjudication tools that was more centered on user needs than just about any federal development project I’ve ever been involved in.
Expanding Consular Affairs’ CX capabilities
Training alone wasn’t going to be enough to help the U.S. Coast Guard expand its own CX capabilities.
A CASE STUDY
My roles
Business development
Workstream lead
Consular Affairs (CA) is the public face of the Department of State. It is a massive organization and as a result, initiatives to improve customer experiences tend to be unevenly distributed across the bureau. When they wanted to invest in improving the experiences of their customers, they came to the Centers of Excellence (CoE) for strategy and leadership.
I designed CoE’s largest customer experience project. We conducted foundational human-centered design activities across five workstreams:
CA/CX culture and policy
Overseas Citizens Services (OCS)
Passport Services
Travel.state.gov
Visa Services
I led the Passport Service workstream where our challenge was to create a foundation for human-centered design (HCD) while training and supporting their staff.
Solution: Conduct foundational customer research while bringing Passport Services staff and leadership along for the ride.
I managed a team of contractors. After conducting and analyzing a dozen stakeholder interviews to better understand the current state, I supervised user researchers in the creation of a foundational analysis of the needs of passport customers. The team researched two types of internal customers, call center staff and the people who adjudicate passport applications. That research informed a journey mapping workshop that I designed and facilitated with participants from across Passport Services.
A separate modernization effort emerged outside of our activities, which forced us to pivot to support the new work. I joined the modernization leadership team. We extended the initial customer research to develop service blueprints. I helped design and run a cross-departmental workshop, leveraging the service blueprints. We folded participant recommendations into modernization initiatives.
Impact
Passport Services leads all other Consular Affairs directorates in the breadth and depth of their HCD efforts. With our help, Passport Services staff and leadership developed and delivered their initial program of modernization initiatives.
Introducing Human-Centered Service Development
What started as a challenging customer experience engagement quickly expanded into an ambitious and innovative product development solution.
A CASE STUDY
My roles
Engagement lead
Product development lead
Workstream lead
The Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) collects taxes on alcohol, tobacco, firearms and ammunition. For more than two decades, TTB’s Office of the Chief Information Officer developed services with limited involvement from the rest of the bureau. The organization became less and less able to identify or address its customers’ needs as a result. An opportunity to rethink service development came with the retirement of the long-time CIO, but early efforts faltered.
Hoping to bolster their nascent service development efforts, TTB asked CoE’s help to expand their customer experience capabilities and create an environment where innovation would be more easily adopted.
Solution: Introduce service development that focused on satisfying customer needs
After interviewing a long list of TTB stakeholders, I came to believe that TTB’s resistance to innovation and lack of connection to customer needs were symptoms that could best be addressed with a new approach to developing services. I recommended a shift in the project’s scope to focus on their faltering service development efforts.
I supervised a team of contractors who conducted customer research, created customer archetypes and developed prototypes.
I supervised a team of contractors who conducted customer research, created customer archetypes and developed prototypes.
I assessed the maturity of TTB’s customer experience capabilities. I designed and facilitated an online workshop where staff and leaders from across the bureau created research-based journey maps
Impact
TTB started rolling out a new service development system as we were closing out our engagement. I collaborated with TTB stakeholders to create roadmaps for the delivery of services and the maturing of customer experience and product development capabilities. I also brought in another group from GSA to discuss how best to introduce product management expertise to support the new system.
Making Humans Unavoidable
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had wasted millions of dollars and ignored users for years before bringing in the U.S. Digital Service to rescue a failing project.
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.
Leveraging Idiosyncratic Expertise
A small DHS agency nestled in rural Vermont depended an outdated, overworked, non-enterprise application to determine immigration status for national and local law enforcement agencies.
A CASE STUDY
My roles
Requirements team lead
User experience designer
A small DHS agency nestled in rural Vermont depended an outdated, overworked, non-enterprise application to determine immigration status for national and local law enforcement agencies. The agency’s success relied entirely on their specialists’ expertise in navigating the existing system, a quirky kludge of the application with a dozen other poorly integrated national and international data systems (many of which were also in great need of an overhaul.)
Solution: Develop requirements by focusing on the skills and needs of the software’s users
Designing an application to replicate the idiosyncratic expertise of the agency’s specialists would have meant extending the corrupt legacy system’s inefficiencies into the new solution. Instead, we focused on automating all tasks best performed with code and reframed the specialists’ processes to leverage immigration status expertise and judgment best supplied by human beings.
As the lead for the requirements team, I conducted specialist interviews, user testing, and other research methods to develop a holistic set of high-level requirements.
Based on those requirements, I introduced a series of conceptual documents to align the efforts of requirements, development, and QA teams. These documents included diagrams describing the jump from a non-automated to a semi-automated system, user flows tracking tasks both within and outside of the application, and a highly visual handbook that explained the basics of the agency and of immigration status determination.
I designed and coded a task-based prototype.
After handing off the prototype, wireframes, and UI specifications, I consulted on usability and tactical issues.