Our Last Hurrah: Introducing VESPA!
What is VESPA?
When we think about putting food on the table, our research led us to the need for assistance. This semester, our team designed the assistant for assistance. Introducing Voice-Enable Services for Pennsylvania, or VESPA as we’ve taken to calling it internally. VESPA is an ecosystem of tools to help people learn more about, estimate their eligibility for, and being applying for benefits, starting with PA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, colloquially known as Food Stamps or EBT). There’s a lot to cover, as we’re putting a bow on over half a year of hard work, but we’re here to take you through the highlights of the past few weeks as well as give you a preview of what you’ll see in our final presentation at the end of the month. But first, let’s talk about what VESPA is going to look like, literally!
Branding
When thinking about our branding (and, really, everything in our design system), we wanted something that would feel approachable and professional. We generated a few words and ideas we thought sounded interesting and embodied concepts around the project. One of the first was Hestia, the Greek goddess of the home, hearth, family, and state. This felt like a great fit in terms of theme as we want our project to bridge some of the gaps between family, the home, and the state. We didn’t love it because it isn’t a particularly sonically pleasing name for our project, and we kept ideating. We took a bit of a break and eventually revisited Hestia, but this time her Roman counterpart, Vesta. She oversees the same domains and has a bit of an easier name to pronounce! We wanted to incorporate Pennsylvania and decided to make a portmanteau with Vesta and the state’s abbreviation to land on VESPA!
We liked the name’s simplicity and ease of understanding for anyone reading it and the connotation with a light and simple method of getting from point A to point B. It also incorporates some meaning that was important to the spirit of the project.
Design System
We also took on designing… well, a design system! It was important to us that we have a design system that reflects the values we’ve tried to build into our solution all along and that our visual design carry that forward as well. Our foundational core includes compassion, flexibility, empowerment, and assistance. Compassion for reminding us who is at the center of our design work — those in need. Flexibility to allow anyone the ability to benefit from our solution and through multiple channels. Empowerment to ensure anyone who uses our solution feels they are in control of the process. And finally, assistance to make sure there is still support when necessary. For us, making the solution approachable was vitally important.
We use a very straightforward language and instructional tone as we learned that those are the most valuable to people interacting with our solution. We tested different tones and found that being very clear and up-front was the most important. In addition, we know that our audience will always include people with less education and experience with technology and potentially many people who speak little English (though we do see a future with support for many languages as well!).
Finally, our visual style has been in development over the last two weeks as well. We wanted the same feeling of being approachable to come through in our visual system that we put forward in our solution. For us, that looked like a few different things to different members of the team and at different points in time. We started with a lighter palette we more or less stumbled onto earlier in the project, including some pastel purples and blues. We experimented with other palettes as well, to see what would work best.
We quickly decided that this wasn’t right for our project; it felt too soft and a little too cautious. We wanted something friendly and approachable, but professional and trustworthy. So we went back to the Figma board, as it were, and tried to think about colors and forms that would lend themselves to our project. It took some time away for us to do some searching on our own for inspiration before we made some progress. We looked back at work we’d already done and decided we liked some elements and wanted to carry them forward. This plus some inspiration from the vast internet led us to reinvigorate our old system of hexagons and breathe new life into the style with a fresh palette.
After some hours tweaking and refining, we ended with the below for our presentation and deliverable materials. It feels professional but straightforward and understandable; knowledgeable but not aloof. It seems like the perfect way for us to put a bow on our project and hand over VESPA.
The VESPA Ecosystem
VESPA is our PA Benefits Screening Ecosystem. We have a specific focus on SNAP. The reason why we’ve focused on the screening portion of the application process is to help bridge the gap between the discovery process that benefits exist and application process. Many people drop off after discovery of benefits deciding that the process is long and arduous, there isn’t much help along the way, and the amount that they would actually receive isn’t worth the hassle. Our goal with this product is to showcase how benefits can be really beneficial under the right circumstances. To this end, we have focused on screening in order to help applicants understand eligibility before they apply. Our tool focuses on creating an experience that is lightweight, informative, and empowering.
As we discussed in the last blog post, we were going through rounds of testing with a narrowed group of applicants. The goal was to validate what we refer to as the VESPA ecosystem — having both a voice-first ecosystem and SMS option for those that may prefer a phone based channel or may want an alternative option to voice for inputting private information. In 5–7 minutes, through either channel, you are able to better understand 1) the types of questions you may be asked in the screening process 2) how much you may or may not be eligible for (on estimate) and 3) understand what other programs you may be eligible for based on your responses in VESPA. Both the voice and SMS screening take you through a variety of question buckets, highlighted in previous posts. The goal of VESPA is to cover a large breadth of policies in order to reach as many potential applicants as possible.
An addition we made to the ecosystem was a follow-up email that further delineates how a particular eligibility status was calculated. The follow-up email provides a breakdown to explain why a candidate did/didn’t qualify and also provides resources to make edits or gain access to additional resources — such as the paper SNAP application and getting connected to a real human. This provides further transparency and support as a potential benefits applicant moves towards the application process — we want to CONTINUE being there for them even if they have completed the screening process with VESPA.
In sum, here are some of the values we carry through the VESPA ecosystem — our philosophy to ensure a great experience for potential benefits applicants:
- Supportive - VESPA provides help, hints, and reminders throughout the screening process as well as next steps leading into the application process. VESPA is more than just a one-time use tool.
- Empowering - VESPA acquaints potential applicants with common types of questions they may experience as they head into the application process.
- Transparent - VESPA provides much needed information on how eligibility is calculated.
- Accessible - VESPA uses simple, easy to understand language and availability across devices to cater to a variety of benefits applicants.
- Up-to-Date - VESPA covers a breadth and depth of government policy to cover a variety of benefits applicants in a range of differing circumstances.
Insights into the Value of VESPA
To arrive at these guiding principles, we took the sum of our research across nearly seven months of work, dozens of interviews, and hundreds of survey responses, and added to it our synthesized findings from our latest round of usability testing. Here’s what we took away from seeing our near-final tool in action:
“Keep it Linear and Literal”
- Inputs should feel natural, regardless of channel (or, how “Y” doesn’t always mean “Yes” to everyone, all the time)
- Provide clear questions and choices
- Reword, elaborate on, or contextualize jargon
- Eliminate questions that are contextually irrelevant
- Present information in digestible chunks to prevent cognitive overwhelm
Give applicants reasons to trust the tool and process
- Capture and display income estimates accurately
- Provide upfront time estimates to help people budget their time
- Differentiate between screening and application processes to manage expectations
- Assure applicants that they can edit their answers should something be captured incorrectly
Not only will our iterations and improvements towards our goals using the above insights create a better experience for potential applicants, but will provide further value to our client and stakeholders. With the SNAP gap in Pennsylvania alone representing millions of dollars of unclaimed benefits (each dollar of which results in more than 150% of that in economic stimulus in other areas). Add to this list the time savings for potential applicants, reduced strain on limited government workers and resources, and a scalable, remote solution for a state (and nation) largely in self-isolation, and it becomes clear that VESPA fills a meaningful niche in work towards greater benefits awareness, access, and utilization.
But deploying a technological tool into a complex, interconnected system is not a silver bullet. In order to create lasting change and set our tool up for long term success, we’ve charted a course for VESPA as an equitable and accessible service ecosystem for years to come. While technology can’t solve systemic problems on its own, we want to acknowledge the role it has to play within broader human systems — both its power to encourage positive change, and its potential to maintain barriers that already exist, and are most keenly felt by people who need the most help.
Final Presentation Coming Soon!
We’re excited to be doing an official reveal of VESPA next week! Through our final presentation, we hope to tell the story of benefits applicants and how VESPA can really aid with their needs, through voice and SMS options. We want to showcase what can be taken as learnings from our 8 months to further extend into the application process and propel Gov AI to become leaders in the space for government related voice products. It has been a really rewarding semester — trying to better understand applicants, the hardships they face, and how to transform an emerging technology into significant value, without leaving anyone behind.
Here’s to small steps towards tackling big, important problems. Until next time,
— Tommy, Conlon, Laura, Simran, and Judy
