Los Angeles Mayor's Office

Each department had it's own unique reasons why the supervisors weren't filling out the forms. The challenge was to communicate this to the stakeholders, who were under the impression that there was one singular issue.

My Challenges

When Los Angeles City employees get injured, they have to fill out a form and also their supervisors have to fill out a form. Their supervisors weren't filling out the forms at all and the city wanted to find out why.

The Problem

I was the Lead UX Researcher and Content Strategist on the project. I led the interviews, discovered research leads and wrote all of the new copy. My team additionally consisted of a Project Manager and an Information Architect/UI Designer.

My Role

THE PROBLEM

The Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Innovations Operations Team wanted to understand why their supervisors weren’t turning in workers’ compensation (money set aside for city workers when they’re injured on the job) forms on time or completely. Whenever the State of California audits the city and finds forms turned in late or incomplete, the city is fined. This, along with the fact that employees will seek remedies via litigation if care isn’t received in a timely, is costing the city of Los Angeles millions of dollars a year.

MY TEAM

My team consisted Information Architect/UI Designer Emma Cheung, Project Manager Vincent Vo. I was the lead researcher, interviewer and guided all presentations for the client.

Phase 1: Discovery

The first thing I wanted to identify was the process end-to-end from when an employee gets injured to the point when the forms are turned in. To do this, I started at the final point of where a claims form ends up, the Personnel Department. I conducted interviews with the analysts and created a flow of the form’s journey in order to better visualize the entire process.

Ideally, an employee reports the injury to their supervisor. The supervisor will then give the employee paperwork to fill out and will fill out a form themselves. Next, it goes to the personnel department who then inputs it into the iVOSS software platform, which is the end of the claim form’s journey.

USER JOURNEY OF A CLAIMS FORM

Phase 2: User Research

LAPD AND FIRE DEPT - HIGHEST RATE OF SUCCESS

I interviewed a coordinator who was in charge of the supervisors at the LAPD. Having worked for several years in the Personnel Department as an Analyst, she was in a unique position to see all the problems with the forms getting turned in on both the personnel side (the people receiving the forms) and the supervisors’ side (our key user group). Her solution was to begin training officers in workers’ comp. We learned:

Prior to training, supervisors had no idea that failure to fill out the forms negatively impacted their budget; they just wanted to go out and protect and serve.
Upon receiving training, they become far more invested in getting the forms completed in time.
They weren’t clear on the process to follow until trained by the coordinator.
Successful completion of forms increased dramatically upon the the start of the training program.

These findings validated a need for training across all departments.

It was time to address the department with the highest rate of incomplete and tardy forms. Upon speaking to another coordinator, we discovered:

Many employees work exclusively in the field and don't have computers to access the form, let alone know how to access them.
Supervisors will often forget to finish forms because they have no way to track their progress, leading them to get frustrated by forgetting where they left off and then they never finish the submitting the form. The injured employee has no recourse but to seek remedy via litigation.
Disciplinary protocols are outlined for supervisors that fail to fill out forms but are never enforce

PARKS AND REC - HIGHEST RATE OF FAILURE

After requesting data on the number of claims filed and comparing it to the number of claims completed by each department, two departments in particular stood out. Department of Sworn Services (LAPD, Fire Dept, etc.) is the best about getting the forms in properly and the Department of Parks and Recreation is the worst. We started our inquiry with Sworn Services to see what they were doing right.

DATA ANALYSIS

Phase 3: Site and Flow Redesign

CARD SORT

We card sorted my interview findings and found that too many people had trouble finding the forms on the Personnel Department’s website. Discoverability was extremely low because of the confusing taxonomy on the primary nav (Is it under the Documents tab? The Forms tab?). We addressed the discoverability issue with a redesign of the website, starting with the primary navigation. Below are the results of our card sort.

I couldn’t redesign the forms since they were official documents from the State of California. I instead looked to see if I could redesign the instructions. What I found was a convoluted set of 4 instructional documents, with redundancies and unnecessary information across all of them. There was also a lack of concision and clarity in the writing. The red X’s denote the parts that I eliminated and the circles represent the redundancies that I consolidated.

FORM INSTRUCTIONS REDESIGN

BEFORE

AFTER

CURRENT FLOW

REDESIGNED FLOW

I removed the unnecessary language and redundancies and kept only the core requirements for the form procedure. I also changed it into a 7 step process, allowing the user to keep track of their progress, another problem that had been identified via research.

After analyzing and synthesizing all of my data from the card sort (results shown above), I focused on the creating a process to provide the clearest pathway to completion. As one can see in the current flow, there are too many diverging pathways that confuse the user, thus decreasing the likelihood of success.

This is redesigned flow is a result of the 7 Step Instructions I ideated. It is much more linear and thus increases the likelihood of completing the task.

REDESIGNING THE USER'S KEY EXPERIENCE

Phase 4: The Road Ahead

At the end of our sprint, the LA Mayor’s Office wanted a proposal for what we could do for the next phase. I led a presentation that culminated these recommendations:

Interview recipients of existing training. See what info is useful, what info is still needed.
Discover which is more effective, one on one or group training.
Study level of knowledge retention over time from training.
Find out more about existing video set and what can be done about modernizing or adding a new set of videos.
Investigate feasibility of proposed features with ITA and adjust feature list accordingly.
Research each department and identify their pain points. Tweak the training module for each department.