Dignity by Design: Bringing Humanity into Product Design
Recently, we partnered with Code for America to help simplify the process for people to sign up for government food assistance, also known as “food stamps” or SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program). It’s part of Code for America’s Integrated Benefits projects — an effort to create single portals for all government assistance.
It was one of the best projects we’ve worked on and we wanted to tell you about how we improved the project’s outcomes by focusing on dignity in the product design process.
Background
Code for America partnered with the amazing Detroit-based design firm Civilla to make the signup process easier using modern technology. For our part, Cylinder Digital worked together with Civilla on the product design and built the web application which signed our first applicants up for SNAP. You can see the results of our work here on our demo site.
The typical application process for SNAP assistance is lengthy. Folks have to fill out a very long form on paper or using an online service. The paper application — called “DHS-1171” in Michigan (PDF) — is FORTY TWO pages long and looks like this taped end-to-end:
The online application is called MI Bridges and looks a lot like the paper version.
Customer Context
In designing a web application, our first step was to understand the applicants and where they are coming from.
The applicants are in a very vulnerable position. First, they are unable to afford enough food for their families. Second, most applicants visit the Michigan Health & Human Services (HHS) offices to get help completing the web form and assembling the required documentation. Asking others for help in this context can be a humiliating process.
Our goal was to make signing up for SNAP easier and bring dignity back to our customers.
The completion rate for the form isn’t great — it was not mobile responsive, it’s very long, and the copy on the form fields ranges from clinical to downright confusing.
It can also be... invasive.
There are a lot of questions which go pretty far into personal experiences, in this case current or previous pregnancies. It’s hard to imagine why this is relevant information for getting food support, but those are topics for another project. We were concerned with the completion rate and how questions like this could lower it because they embarrassed the applicant.
The Impact on Experience
Long web forms are notorious for low completion rates and aggravating the applicants. There are lots of easy wins when improving a long form like breaking up long forms to multiple pages (AKA The Wizard), saving work as you go (and allowing people to finish later), and better help text copy.
These address very understandable behavior: people will find almost any reason to abandon a long multipage webform.
Hypothesis
We hypothesized that asking sensitive questions in an insensitive way did not feel dignified and likely increased form abandonment. Instead, if we asked questions in a more human way, can help both treat people with dignity and encourage form completion.
An Example
When signing up for SNAP, an applicant is asked if they have recently been pregnant. While a very personal question, the information is necessary to determine both eligibility and amount of food assistance.
The paper form looks like this:
On our application, we start by taking demographic information including applicant’s name and sex and follow up by asking about the members of the household (specifically, people with whom you prepare food).
Our First Pass
Taking direction from the paper form, we asked more-or-less the same question in our application:
We followed a “yes” response by asking who this situation applied to:
You’ll note that we are asking if the household applicant who self-described as male if they are pregnant. For most men, this is an awkward question, but not the end of the world. It’s worth noting here that while perhaps not common, trans men can also be pregnant and give birth, so maybe this is the correct behavior.
Let’s Do Better — Part 1
If you choose your own sex to be female, we direct the question to you:
To us, it felt like a small but important change — a dignified way to ask a personal question.
Note that we’ve also broken a big question with many parts into several small parts.
Let’s Do Better — Part 2
If you identify someone is in your household as female, we ask if they have been pregnant recently and address them by name:
Doesn’t that seem more human?
Conclusions
When we treat our customers like humans, we are more likely to have them complete a long multi-part form. This is especially true for fellow citizens in vulnerable situations and when we are asking sensitive questions.
Part of treating people with dignity is giving people the respect they deserve. Even small things like remembering their name or framing questions so they’re easy to understand respects their time and value.
We think of web applications as an interface to a “computer” — a database, server, maybe another application. Instead, we should consider web applications as a temporary stand-in for a person. Yes, it’s just a computer, but some human eventually processes the information on the backend, so the app is really an intermediary between two people talking. Software should display all the courtesy and warmth we’d like to see from other people.
Designing experiences with dignity in mind will garner incredible results for the people using services like SNAP and for organizations which provide them.
Gratitude
Big thanks to Joel Oliveira for noticing this issue during the project and proposing a fix. Thanks to Jessie Young, Rachel Cope, and Zee Spencer who worked on the project from our side. Thanks also to Dan Perrera, Pavan Trikutam, and Rudhir Krishtel for helpful edits and feedback.
