AdoptUSKids, a federally funded national project, maintains the only national photolisting of youth in foster care in the United States. For child welfare professionals, the AdoptUSKids photolisting is a powerful tool that makes their jobs a little easier. Some examples of how the tool helps them include helping caseworkers find home-studied families interested in adoption, managing cases and accounts, sharing information with colleagues, and responding to inquiries made by registered families.
The dashboard redesign was part of a larger, overarching project objective which was to make the photolisting application mobile-responsive.
The dashboard is the first page a user encounters upon login of the photolisting application and it is the main hub where they access the majority of the tools in order to complete their daily tasks.
Goals for the dashboard included updating and modernizing the visual design based on our branding guidelines and 508 accessibility standards and improving the user experience within given constraints.
There were several constraints that limited our capacity: resourcing, pre-existing technical debt, working with an old legacy platform, and a tight timeline. Our developer determined that only certain technical upgrades could be made to the dashboard. My team considered many possibilities to make the dashboard experience better for users knowing that we would have to determine a minimally viable product for delivery.
RESEARCH & DISCOVERY
Data showed that the majority of child welfare professionals using the photolisting were logging in via desktop or laptop computers. However, we also knew that an increasing number of workers had access to tablets and used their phones for their jobs as they were often on the road visiting the youth on their caseloads. It was important that caseworkers who logged onto the photolisting dashboard for a significant amount of their work could easily find tools and access them from any device.
In addition to reviewing analytics data, my team also reviewed annual user surveys administered by the national project’s evaluation team. These surveys were sent out to child welfare professionals asking about their general satisfaction with our services.
The photolisting dashboard serves a range of child welfare professionals:
Keeping these personas in mind, I spent time using and exploring the dashboard and application to understand the tools and features. What a user sees on their dashboard depends on the type of persona they are and user level account that they have. For example, a “full privilege” account level would see more dashboard options compared to a user with a “view only” account level. Logging in and using the dashboard as specific user account level types helped me see and experience pain points and better empathize with users.
In my review of the dashboard, I noticed that there was a missed opportunity to make information more readable. Data points and other information that workers needed to find quickly weren't very findable. And the color palette needed to be updated to meet 508 accessibility standards.
The team analyzed the dashboard navigation structure and data to understand which navigation links were the most and least popular. We wanted to determine if and which information “buckets” could be consolidated, removed, or renamed. The purpose of this research was to streamline the architecture for mobile because the existing navigation was long and unwieldy.
To further the research, I conducted comparative analysis and looked at a variety of dashboards ranging from personal banking applications to healthcare providers to see what worked and didn’t work. Here are some of my takeaways:
DESIGN
Coming out of the research phase we identified the need to reorganize the navigation structure and content hierarchy by creating new navigation “buckets,” moving the news and announcement feed, and focusing on actionable content.
My responsibilities in this next phase involved:
Some common tasks we asked users to complete:
We recruited five participants and stipulated that they had to be registered users of the application and we had to test at least three of the five user level account types. Participants walked through nine tasks. The method we used was remote moderated testing and we asked users to think aloud as they completed their tasks.
All the participants were able to easily complete their tasks and their feedback was very positive. One participant thought the information navigation was more streamlined and another commented on the label buckets saying they appreciated them being bigger and bolder. Only one participant felt like there was something missing from the prototype. They couldn’t find a link to resources which would normally be found at the bottom of the dashboard page. In our data review, we found that it was a seldom used link which is why it was removed. Upon further discussion, the team decided to move forward without the link and find a place for it within our help section and to do further user research and testing after launch.
From the testing phase we moved on to final design. The high-fidelity prototype included all the visual design elements and the final color palette.
I took what I learned from the research and discovery phase and applied my main takeaways.
