Leading digital transformation for the Department of Defense Education
I designed and launched a digital-first solution that aligns with user workflows, prioritizing speed and accuracy for the Depart of Defense Education. This streamlined platform automates tasks, eliminates manual data entry, and integrates tools, offering intuitive interfaces, real-time updates, and notifications. This boosted job satisfaction by 31%.
Role
UX Lead
End Users
DoDEA Educators and Licensure Analysts
Project Duration
3 Months
Responsibilities:
Design
Research + Discovery
Usability Testing
The Problem:
The Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) is responsible for planning, directing, coordinating, and managing prekindergarten through 12th-grade educational programs on behalf of the United States Department of Defense (DoD).
DoDEA administers its own professional educator certification and recertification program and is comparable to any State Department of Education. The current process of updating an Educator's record is manual and involves Licensure Analysts utilizing a combination of excel spreadsheets, email, hard-coding, and traditional mail. This approach is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and causes frustration for both user groups. As a result, it introduces inefficiencies in workflows.
The Solution:
Create a digital-first solution that aligns with the mental models and workflow of both personas. By prioritizing speed and accuracy, we can reimagine the process as a streamlined digital platform. This platform would automate and integrate tasks, eliminating the need for manual data entry and reliance on disparate tools. It would provide intuitive interfaces, real-time updates, and notifications to ensure timely and accurate record updates. The goal is to enhance productivity and satisfaction for both Licensure Analysts and Educators.
Discover
Analyzing the Current State:
Analog-based Process: Licensure Analysts manually update educator records using a mixture of Excel spreadsheets, email, hard coding, legacy databases and snail mail.
PHYSICAL TEACHER'S CERTIFICATION / ENDORSEMENT WORKSHEET
User Interviews:
Educators:
We conducted Interviews with 5 different educators located around the globe.
Major pain points:
Information Overload: If an educator wants to add an endorsement (i.e. subject/grade level), must sift through 100+ endorsement codes and requirements on DoDEA web page.
Cumbersome Manual Process: Educators must manually scan and email transcripts to DoDEA.
Unclear Expiration Dates: Educators are unsure of when their teaching licenses may expire and have to manually keep track.
User Interviews:
Stakeholders & Licensure Professionals
We conducted interviews with 6 licensure professionals individually including licensure chiefs, licensure analysts, and junior licensure analysts.
Major pain points:
Multiple Systems: Licensure Analysts manage employee records across three systems: email, spreadsheets, and DoDEA database.
Manual Process = increased odds of human error.
No Filters: Licensure analysts are unable to filter the list of educators, schools, and endorsements.
Stretched Thin: Case loads were high; 6-8 licensure analysts are in charge of 300k+ Educators.
“
“...manual keying of the endorsements and making sure the list they pull is accurate and up-to-date. Working off a spreadsheet, a printed list, sifting through emails… it’s exhausting.”
-Trish Cantwell, Licensure Analyst AdminDefine
Identifying Key Flows:
We began with a thorough analysis of the current process and explored what interactions existed and where there was room for further exploration.
We identified two main flows:
Renewing a teacher license
Adding an endorsement, i.e. a new area of expertise or subject such as teaching 6th grade or teaching English.
How might we…
help users feel confident that they are submitting and approving requests in a timely and accurate manner?
Ideation
We delved into numerous concepts and designs to reach a solution. Here are some of the ideas:
AN EXAMPLE OF ENDORSEMENTS ON LINKEDIN.COMConcept One: Educator Directory
Have a profile page where Licensure Analysts can look up Educators on a directory and initiate/ approve requests.
Pros:
Familiar pattern
Treating system as a directory / social
Cons:
Doesn’t solve for speed and accuracy
Time-consuming and too manual
Level of Effort:
High
Level of Impact:
Medium
A SCREENSHOT FROM SERVICENOW, A POPULAR DIGITAL WORKFLOW SOLUTIONConcept Two: Ticketing System
A ticketing system where Educators and Licensure Analysts can message each other back and forth for approval on requests.
Pros:
Solves for speed: Licensure Analysts get a request instantly
Solves for accuracy: Educators get to know the status of their requests
Cons:
Learning curve
Most out-of-box sass solutions aren’t user-friendly
Level of Effort:
Medium
Level of Impact:
High
A SCREENSHOT FROM ASANA, DEMONSTRATING CAPABILITIES OF A DASHBOARDConcept Three: Dashboard
A dashboard where Licensure Analysts and Educators can track, modify and instigate requests through a multi-step flow pattern.
Pros:
Users can track updates and history via widgets
Users have clear entry points to instigate requests via main CTA’s
Cons:
Users don’t need aggregation.
Assists with speed and accuracy, but not completely.
Level of Effort:
High
Level of Impact:
Low
Deliver
Teacher's certification - educator's view - endorsement flow:
Teacher's certification - licensure analyst's view - endorsement flow:
Iteration
Usability Testing
Next, we carried out a round of usability testing in order to reveal potential usability problems. We conducted usability tests with ten users; five Educators and five Licensure Analysts.
We observed them while they completed three different tasks using our prototype on an desktop computer, such as adding an endorsement, adding a certification, and receiving a PNOD letter. These sessions were conducted remotely through Zoom.
Document Upload:
Users can upload up to four documents with the document uploader. We saw in testing that since the document uploader moves further out of the viewport the more documents a user uploads, multiple users were missing the CTA. We decided to keep the document uploader persistent at the top of the page until users had uploaded the maximum number of documents.
Measuring success
Because we are starting from scratch, we have no previous KPI’s or metric to compare to. For measuring success, we are going to:
Solicit qualitative feedback surveys to Educators after a request has been submitted.
Measure customer engagement from month-to-month.
Measure adoption rates: because the old analog system is still in place, we can track who is using the new system vs. the old.
Keep in touch with our sponsor users. One advantage to having the client also be the user is that we are in constant contact with them. We set up an anonymous digital suggestion box and scheduled a weekly touch-base meeting where we can discuss updates and continue iterating.
Insights:
Because the client one was one of the user groups they often didn’t have as much sympathy for the other user groups.
Direct One-on-One interviews were much more productive than Stakeholder interviews. Often one member of the group would dominate the conversation, and we realized that opinions would be biased.
Users had a misconception that simply by digitizing their current state process that it would solve all of their problems. Part of the process was educating the users on why there were still problems to be uncovered in our discovery phase; part of the fun was uncovering those issues and them buying into our design process.
Impact
Eight months after launch, we recorded a 31% increase in job satisfaction, as measured by a Likert survey conducted to benchmark success both before and after the release.