2022-2023
U.S. DOL, Safal Partners
Web Design, Mobile Design
Product Designer, Project Manager
When the previous contractor left the US DOL TAU team without a scheduling tool, we we're tasked to build a product that not only fulfilled the need, but did that with budget and extreme time constraints in mind. An MVP was planned and quickly iterated on in order to build a product that was scalable, and immediately usable.
The previous scheduling tool used for DOL events was owned by the previous contract holding agency. Upon transitioning, the planning tool rights were revoked. The DOL saw this as an opportunity for a much needed upgrade.
A new and improved, feature rich, government event planning and scheduling product to meet the diverse needs of the DOLs audience. The tool had to meet government level compliance and accessibility standards while maintaining a competitive level of design in both form and function, and also be scalable and future-proof for ongoing sprints and additional needs as they may arise.
1 Designer
1 Project Manager
2 Product Owners
3 Developers
3 months to deliver MVP
- Led the design process from wire-framing to high-fidelity designs and assembling a clickable prototype.
- Worked with dev to analyze the prior tool utilized by the TAU team to facilitate events scheduling, and conducted a competitive audit of the product.
- Project management across requirements planning, presenting and proposing to stakeholders, and coordinating with development.
- Conducted 5 user interviews.
- Conducted testing with subject experts and the internal team responsible for events, in order to identify the prior user flow/events booking process from the user request, to the approval and event coordination process. I then mapped that process as well as the newly proposed and improved flow for documentation and planning.
Product Design, Project Management
After conducting user interviews, all the participants responses were synthesized to identify themes, opportunities, and features that MuSchool could focus and improve upon.
A substantial amount of time was put into scoping out the extent of the product, roadmaps, roles and responsibilities, MVP, and overall level of effort to be presented to leadership for sign off.
After establishing our business case and level of effort, our north star goal, requirements, and roadmap were planned.
Designing a custom scheduling tool for the federal government came with its challenges. Not only did the tool have to meet strict accessibility and compliance standards, but also had to look and feel like a usable and modern product. All while maintaining a strictly allocated budget and even more strict timeline.
A modern and highly usable event request flow was created to balance the lengthy process and requirements needed to conduct a TAU event.
Additionally the choice of a wizard meant we could provide important contextual information and FAQs as it pertains to each step so the user could consciously engage with the requested info on each step. This contributed to the decreased number of support tickets and need for assistance, thus freeing up time for support staff.
I opted for a step-based wizard to make the experience feel more digestible, focused, tactile and interactive rather than exhaustively reading walls of text and inputs from an endless list.
In the back-end, submitting a request took a few moments to process. The lack of feedback and abrupt redirect to the users dashboard ultimately gave a feeling of distrust on whether the request submission was successful. I worked with our engineering team to implement a deliberate loading delay and processing modal to convey a more explicit change affordance.
Each event request was required to go through a series of approvals at different levels of the DOLs TAU unit. This required extensive logic planning sessions and an iterative process to identify all necessary features, security steps, supporting doc exchange, and notifications for all parties. We're still iterating on these features, and support staff is engaging with us to fine tune their process. Advanced search, sort, and filter features have been a major process improvement for staff, making their ability to track revisions, edit, and address event requests considerable easier.
By nature of the client, The ETA TA Event Planner required meticulous documentation and organization. From a detailed design system to copy writing, flow mapping, and more.
Showing a selection of the ETA TA Event planner design system as well as additional email template designs
Mapping was done in order to identify areas of improvement, manual processes that could be automated, and unnecessary friction that could be alleviated by an improved UX.
